International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level (Palgrave Studies in International Relations)

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Author: Barry Buzan | Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

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International Society and the Middle East English School Theory at the Regional Level

Edited by

Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

International Society and the Middle East

10.1057/9780230234352 - International Society and the Middle East, Edited by Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series

Audie Klotz, Department of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University, USA Palgrave Studies in International Relations, produced in association with the ECPR Standing Group for International Relations, will provide students and scholars with the best theoretically informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. Edited by Knud Erik Jørgensen and Audie Klotz, this new book series will comprise cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. Titles include Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (editors) INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY AND THE MIDDLE EAST English School Theory at the Regional Level Cornelia Navari (editor) THEORISING INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY English School Methods Robbie Shilliam GERMAN THOUGHT AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project

Palgrave Studies In International Relations Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0230–20063-0 You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



General Editors: Knud Erik Jørgensen, Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark

English School Theory at the Regional Level Edited by

Barry Buzan Montague Burton Professor of International Relations London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez Independent Writer and Advisor on International Affairs, UK



International Society and the Middle East

Editorial matter, selection and conclusion © Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009 All remaining chapters © respective authors 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–53764–4 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–53764–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.



For Rebecca whose gestation accompanied that of this book



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Contents ix

Preface

x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiv

List of Arabic Terms

xvi

1

The Middle East and Conceptions of ‘International Society’ Fred Halliday

2

The Middle East through English School Theory Barry Buzan

3

The Ottoman Empire and its Precedents from the Perspective of English School Theory Amira K. Bennison

45

The Middle East Encounter with the Expansion of European International Society A. Nuri Yurdusev

70

The Primary Institutions of the Middle Eastern Regional Interstate Society Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

92

4

5

6

7

1

24

The Secondary Institutions of the Middle Eastern Regional Interstate Society Simon W. Murden

117

Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation: From Arab Interstate Societies to an Arab-Islamic World Society Morten Valbjørn

140

vii



List of Tables and Figures

Contents

8

Islam, the Middle East and the Pan-Islamic Movement Sohail H. Hashmi

9

Order and Change in the Middle East: A Neo-Gramscian Twist on the International Society Approach Raymond Hinnebusch

10

Conclusions Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

170

201

226

Bibliography

251

Index

264



viii

Tables and Figures

2.1 5.1 5.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3

Contemporary international institutions (primary and secondary). Contemporary international institutions (master and derivative). Primary institutions of the Middle Eastern interstate society. Arab nationalisms. The transformations of Arab nationalisms, Arab interstate and world societies. Muslim versus national identity (2005/06, per cent of respondents). Christian versus national identity (2006, per cent of respondents). Identity markers among Arab populations (to an Arab/to an American) (2002, per cent of respondents).

41 93 115 144 148 196 197 198

Figures 6.1

6.2

Understanding the character of international society as indicated by the secondary institutions of the international system (by interpretative analysis). The development of international society in the Middle East as indicated by the progress of its secondary institutions (by interpretative analysis).

118

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Tables

The idea for this book grew out of conversations between the editors which linked together Buzan’s interest in exploring the regional level of English school theory set out in his 2004 book From International to World Society? and Gonzalez-Pelaez’s engagement with the Middle East. It also built on our earlier collaborations on the English school. To realise the project, we needed to combine English school theory with expertise on the Middle East, and hoped to throw useful light on both areas. Our decision to choose the Middle East was pragmatic rather than principled, and we think that the approach used here could also be used to analyse other regional international societies. Having made this choice, we needed to find a group of authors who both commanded a depth of expertise on the Middle East, and who would be willing to work within a specifically English school framing. We are extremely grateful to those who accepted our invitation and agreed to shape their own analysis in this way. Crossing disciplinary boundaries is often uncomfortable, and seldom easy, but at least for us the exercise paid big dividends. We both learned a tremendous amount, and as should be obvious from Chapter 10, we think that the encounter with the Middle East provided as much or more food for thought for English school scholars as the other way around. We would like to thank the British Academy and BISA who jointly funded an authors’ workshop held in July 2007 in London. Since the authors were, for the most part, strangers to each other beforehand, this workshop was instrumental in allowing us to exchange information and understanding, and to get to grips with each other’s points of view. Without that opportunity for cross-disciplinary exchange this project would have been much less fruitful than it has been. We would also like to thank Naz Sunay, who both provided some background research and did a great job of compiling the final manuscript and the index. And thanks to the LSE for providing the resources to pay her. Barry Buzan Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez London

x



Preface

Amira K. Bennison is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge. Recent publications include: Cities in the Pre-modern Islamic World (2007); ‘The “New Order” and Islamic Order: The Introduction of the Nizami Army in the Western Maghrib and its Legitimation, 1830–1873’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 36:4 (2004); Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre-Colonial Morocco (2002); ‘Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization’, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.) Globalization in World History (2002). Barry Buzan is the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the LSE and Honorary Professor at Copenhagen and Jilin Universities. Recent publications include: Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (2003, co-authored with Ole Wæver); From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (2004); and The United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2004). Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez is an independent writer and advisor on international affairs, trade and development based in London. She has served as a consultant in the Middle East for the United Nations Development Programme and other organisations, worked in broadcast news media and published in various journals. Publications include: Human Rights and World Trade (2005); ‘International Community after Iraq’, International Affairs, 81:1 (2005, co-authored with Barry Buzan); ‘A Viable Project of Solidarism?’, International Relations, 17:3 (2003, co-authored with Barry Buzan). Fred Halliday is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE and ICREA Research Professor at IBEI (Barcelona Institute of International Relations). Recent publications include: ‘ “The Clash of Civilisations?”: Sense and Nonsense’, in R. Boase (ed.) Islam and Global Dialogue: Religious Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace (2005); 100 Myths about the Middle East (2005); The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (2005); ‘9/11 and Middle Eastern Studies Past and Future: Revisiting Ivory Towers on Sand’, International Affairs, 80:5 (2004).

xi





Sohail H. Hashmi is Associate Professor of International Relations and Alumnae Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences at Mount Holyoke College. Publications include: Sohail Hashmi (ed.) Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict (2002); ‘Moral Communities and Political Boundaries: Islamic Perspectives’, in Allen Buchanan and Margaret Moore (eds) States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries (2003); ‘Islamic Ethics in International Society’, in David Mapel and Terry Nardin (eds) International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (1998); ‘International Society and its Islamic Malcontents’, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 20 (1996). Raymond Hinnebusch is Professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies. He is the author of The International Politics of the Middle East (2003); The Foreign Policies of Middle East States (2001, co-edited with A. Ehteshami); ‘Identity in International Relations: Constructivism versus Materialism and the Case of the Middle East’, Review of International Affairs (2003); and The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences (2006, co-edited with Rick Fawn). Simon W. Murden is a Senior Lecturer in Strategic Studies and International Affairs at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. Publications include: Emergent Regional Powers and International Relations in the Gulf 1988–91 (1995); Islam, the Middle East and the New Global Hegemony (2002); ‘Political Economy: From Modernization to Globalization’, in Youssef Choueiri (ed.) A Companion to the History of the Middle East (2005); and ‘Culture in World Affairs’, in John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds) The Globalization of World Politics (2008, 4th edition). Morten Valbjørn is post doc. at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, where he also received his PhD. Recent publications include: ‘Before, During and After the Cultural Turn: A “Baedeker” to IR’s Cultural Journey’, International Review of Sociology, 18:1 (2008); ‘Blank, Blind or Blinded? – Cultural Investigations in International Relations’, in Knud Erik Jørgensen and Tonny Brems Knudsen (eds) International Relations in Europe: Traditions, Perspectives and Destinations (Routledge, 2006); ‘Towards a “Mesopotamian Turn”: Disciplinarity and the Study of the International Relations of the Middle East’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 14:1–2 (2004).



xii

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A. Nuri Yurdusev is Professor of International Relations at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. He has a PhD from the University of Leicester and in 2003 was Senior Associate, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is the author of International Relations and the Philosophy of History: A Civilizational Approach (2003); and the editor of Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional? (2004).




ACC AMU ASEAN BIS CITES EB EU FIS FTSE GAFTA GATT GCC GWoT IAGS IBRD ICC ICJ IGO IMF I(N)GO IPCC IR IT LSE MEES Mercosur MFN NATO NSA OAPEC OIC OPEC PKK PKO PLO

Arab Cooperation Council Arab Maghreb Union Association of Southeast Asian Nations Bank for International Settlements Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species Energy Bulletin European Union Islamic Salvation Front Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange Greater Arab Free Trade Area General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gulf Cooperation Council Global war on terrorism Institute for the Analysis of Global Security International Bank for Reconstruction and Development International Criminal Court International Court of Justice Intergovernmental organisation International Monetary Fund International non-governmental organisation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change International Relations Information Technology London School of Economics and Political Science Middle East Economic Survey Southern Common Market (of South America) Most favoured nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-state actors Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries Organisation of the Islamic Conference Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) Peacekeeping operations Palestinian Liberation Organization

xiv



Abbreviations

RSC SEATO TNA UAE UAR UK UN UNFCCC UNHCR US USSR WTO

xv

Regional security complex Southeast Asia Treaty Organization Transnational actor United Arab Emirates United Arab Republic United Kingdom United Nations United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United Nations Refugee Agency United States Union of Soviet Socialist Republics World Trade Organization



List of Abbreviations

‘Abbasid dynasty ahdname ahl al-taswiyya ajnas ‘Alawi amir amir al-mu’minin ansar Aq Qoyunlu

Ash‘ari askeri bay‘a Bedouins caliph caliphate

dar al-‘ahd

dar al-harb dar al-islam dar al-kufr dar al-sulh da‘wa

A dynasty of caliphs who ruled the eastern Islamic Empire from 750 to 1258 Capitulations People of equality Races, ethnic groups A sect of Shi‘i Islam prominent in Syria Commander, general or prince Traditional title of the Muslim caliphs Natives of Medina who helped Muhammad and muhajirun An Oghuz Turkic tribal federation that ruled parts of present-day eastern Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, northern Iraq and western Iran from 1378 to 1508 An early school of theology within Sunni Islam Tax-exempt politico-military elite in Ottoman Empire An oath of allegiance Members of a community of Arabic-speaking desert nomads of the Middle East The spiritual head and temporal leader of the Islamic state, the caliphate. See khalifa The Islamic form of government representing the political unity and leadership of the Muslim world. See khilafa The house of truce – a third zone between dar al-islam and dar al-harb used to describe the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with its Christian tributary states The house of war – those countries where Islam does not dominate and Islamic law, Shari‘a, is not applied The house of Islam – those countries where Islam dominates and Shari‘a is applied The house of infidels – see dar al-harb The house of treaty – see dar al-‘ahd The call to Islamic faith

xvi



Arabic Terms

dhimmi din-ü-devlet eyalet eyalet mumtaze fatwa Fatimid caliphate fedayeen ghaza ghazi Ghuzz Turks hadith hajj Hanafi Hanbali Hashemite

Hijra ‘ibadat Idrisid dynasty imam

imamate

infitah islahat ittihad-i islam Janissaries

xvii

Protected non-Muslim population within a state governed by Shari‘a Fusion of religion (din) and state (devlet) Province Privileged provinces A religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar – plural fatawa A Shi‘i Arab dynasty that ruled over the Maghreb, Egypt and Levant between 909 and 1171 Freedom fighters or self-sacrificers A battle associated with the expansion of Muslim territory ‘Warrior for the faith’ – participants in ghaza See Oghuz Turks Traditions relating to the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad The ‘major’ pilgrimage to Mecca One of the four schools of jurisprudence within Sunni Islam One of the four schools of jurisprudence within Sunni Islam Refers to those belonging to the ‘clan of Hashim’, a clan within the larger Quraysh; a modern claimant of descent from the Prophet The Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 The aspects of worship in Islam First Shi‘i dynasty that ruled over western Maghreb between 788 and 985 In Imami Shi‘ism, ‘Ali and his eleven descendants who are acknowledged as leaders of the community; in Sunni Islam, title for the leader used interchangeably with caliph In Imami Shi‘ism, the leadership of the community exercised by ‘Ali and his eleven successors; in Sunni Islam, synonymous with caliphate Open door Reformation The union of Islam New troops – the standing Ottoman army





al Jazeera jihad

kanun khalifa

khan khilafa madhahib madrasa Mahdiyya Maliki Mamluk sultanate millet system Mongol Empire

Mongol Ilkhanids

mu‘amalat Mughal Empire

muhajirun

A television network headquartered in Doha, Qatar The spiritual struggle of each person, against vice, passion and ignorance, or more commonly used as holy war against infidels The tabulation of administrative and secular regulations in the Ottoman Empire Literally meaning ‘deputy’ or ‘steward’ – more specific meaning in Islam as the successor to Prophet Muhammad’s position as the political, military and administrative leader of Muslims: the caliph Title for a sovereign or a military ruler Caliphate, the government of the Muslim state, where khalifa is the head Islamic schools of jurisprudence – singular madhhab A building or group of buildings used for teaching Islamic theology and religious law A nineteenth-century movement in Egyptian Sudan to reform Islam One of the four schools of jurisprudence within Sunni Islam Ruled Egypt between 1250 and 1517 People grouped by religious confession in the Ottoman Empire The largest contiguous empire in world history which emerged in 1206 from the unification of Mongol and Turkic tribes in modern-day Mongolia One of the four khanates within the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries centred in present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and western Pakistan Matters related to human interaction in worldly matters An empire ruled by a Turkic-Mongol dynasty that controlled most of the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The early Muslims who migrated with the Prophet from Mecca to Medina



xviii

mu’minun Mu‘tazili

Oghuz Turks Ottoman Empire

qaba’il Qajar dynasty qawm qawmiyya qibla Qur’an Quraysh reaya rihlat rumi Safavid dynasty salaf sanjak Sassanid Empire

Seljuk Empire

Shari‘a sharif

xix

True believers in Islam A theological school within Sunni Islam which was particularly active from the eighth to the eleventh centuries One of the major branches of Turkic peoples Multiethnic and multireligious Turkish-ruled empire that controlled much of south-eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa between 1299 and the First World War Tribes Qajar royal family of Turkic descent that ruled Iran between 1794 and 1925 Segment of society bound by solidarity ties, whether it be an extended family, clan, tribe etc. Allegiance to the ethnic nation, uniting all tribes and people in one community Direction for prayer in Islam Central religious text of Islam The dominant tribe of Mecca at the time of the appearance of Islam Tax-paying subject population in the Ottoman Empire Travel accounts The European dimension of the Ottoman Empire An Iranian Shi‘i dynasty that ruled Persia from 1501 to 1722 Righteous ancestors – generally refers to the first three generations of Muslims Districts – first-level subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire A Persian empire that ruled over today’s Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Afghanistan and eastern Turkey between 226 and 651 A medieval Sunni Muslim empire established by a branch of Oghuz Turks in 1037 that controlled an area including Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and eastern Anatolia The body of Islamic religious law Traditional Arab title for a person descended from the Prophet Muhammad





shaykh Shi‘i

shu‘ub Shu‘ubiyya movement Sufi Sufism sunna Sunni tajir talab al-‘ilm tanzimat tarajim tariqat tharwa thawra töre ‘ulama Umayyad dynasty umma uli al-amr ‘umra

Uzbek khanate

vilayet Wahhabism wali al-amr watan wataniyya yasa

An honorific title, often used for a religious official in Islam The second largest denomination of Islam after Sunni Islam with large followings in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Bahrain and the Indian subcontinent Nations Response by non-Arab Muslims to the privileged status of Arabs in the umma A practitioner of Sufism An inner or mystical dimension of Islam The way – the religious and moral code that was instituted by the Prophet Muhammad The largest denomination of Islam Merchant Travel in search of knowledge Reorganisation Biographical dictionaries Sufi orders following the way or method prescribed by their guides – singular tariqa Resources Revolution Turkic dynastic law Islamic scholars, particularly of law The first dynasty of the Muslim caliphate between 661–750 The universal community of Muslims Those in authority: the rulers of a state The ‘minor’ pilgrimage to Mecca performed by Muslims that can be undertaken at any time of the year Any one of the three states that ruled Transoxiana – present-day Uzbekistan – from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century An administrative division – province A conservative reform movement in Islam founded in late eighteenth-century Arabia Holder of authority Homeland, fatherland Patriotism, allegiance to the geographical nation Code of laws in Mongol Empire



xx

1 Fred Halliday

Introduction: IR theory and regional analysis Of all the areas of the third world, the Middle East is the one that has the longest history of interaction, military, political and economic, with the ‘West’ and, in particular, with the European state system, this latter understood as the set of institutions and norms that have together shaped modern, that is post-1500, and in particular post-1945, international relations. China, remote and unsubjugated, and the Americas, subjugated but unassimilated, have for sure provided alternative points of reference, not least with regard to arguments as to the universality of human character and customs, but for all their importance, real and symbolic, they have been markedly less important than the Ottomans, the Arab world, ‘Islam’ and Persia. At the same time, engagement with this region, and the conceptual, normative and policy debates this has occasioned, has done more than any other to stimulate and challenge European and more generally ‘Western’ thinking on international relations. In recent years this engagement has taken particularly acute and vivid form, in debates on the ‘Clash of Civilisations’, the incidence of terrorism, the failures of democratisation, and broader discussions of cultural and normative difference between the Muslim and Western systems. However, such challenges long predate the contemporary, post-Cold War period: we need only think of the nineteenth-century discussions of how to relate to the Ottoman Empire; of eighteenth-century musings on the issue of ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Oriental’ despotism; of the seventeenth-century discussion of Islam, or ‘the Turk’, as a spur to the greater integration and co-ordination of European states’ foreign policies. At the same time, the implications for contemporary academic discussion are many: the 1



The Middle East and Conceptions of ‘International Society’

argument as to Islam as an enemy, or ‘Other’, and as a substitute for the communist foe lost in 1991, broaches deep issues within International Relations while in broader discussions of the relative universality and particularity of values the Middle East, and ‘Islam’, often play a significant, if contrapuntal role, as in the work of Michael Walzer, on ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ values, or in the role played within the later work of John Rawls (1999) by a mythical, but clearly Islamic, illiberal state, ‘Kazanistan’. All analytic and theoretical engagement with a particular history, state or region, involves a two-way, double, challenge: it is not just a matter of seeing if a particular theory can explain and conceptually order the politics, and international relations, of a specific country or region, but also of seeing how far this specific case, be it a state, event or region, itself challenges the theory.1 All major historical events, be they wars, revolutions or economic transformations, pose such a double challenge, and the same is true of regions. The list of those theories that have, in recent decades, encountered and been challenged by the Middle East is long: modernisation theory, dependency theory, Orientalism (however defined), constructivism, democratic peace theory not to mention many varieties of conceptualisation based on nationalist myth, conspiracy theory, Cold War paranoia, or overzealous imposition of military and security considerations. There has, indeed, been no shortage of words and general theories in analysis of the Middle East. The exploration of how the English school could engage with the region is, therefore, both a creative and a welcome one, and invites precisely that kind of dual interaction, of theory and region, that has stimulated discussion within other conceptual frameworks. In what follows, exploring some of the reflections I have earlier expressed on the English school approach in general, and some of my own findings and intuitions on the international relations of the Middle East in particular, I shall attempt to sketch out precisely such a dual, exploratory and critical engagement.

1 The English school: achievements The original tenets of the English school are well known to students of IR, and are clearly expounded in other chapters of this book.2 In summary form, the classical variant of the English school (for example Bull, 1977; Wight, 1977; Bull and Watson, 1984; Mayall, 1990) posits a theoretical, and historical, framework that combines elements of classical realism, such as the emphasis on military power and competition, the primacy of the state, the role of great powers, and the interstate function of wars, with themes normally associated with a ‘liberal’ or ‘Grotian’ approach



2 Fred Halliday

3

to international relations. These latter posit that interstate competition and the incidence of war are mitigated, in some instances at least, by the acceptance of shared values, of a formal, legal, and informal, ‘institutional’ character, where institutional refers not to what are normally regarded as established organisations, but rather regular, normative, legal and shared principles: hence the use of the concept ‘international society’, as opposed to the more competitive ‘international system’ of conventional realism. The essential message of the English school is contained in the famous oxymoron which Hedley Bull proclaimed in his classic exposition of this approach, The Anarchical Society: the international system is, on the one hand devoid of a central authority, hence in the technical and original Greek sense without (an) rule (archi). The English school also has, in common with Marxism and liberalism, and in contrast to orthodox realism, a view of history and of historical change, especially as regards the development and global diffusion of its model of ‘society’. This historical perspective is subsumed in the concept ‘expansion of international society’, this seen as a process, coinciding more or less with the spread of European diplomatic, political and legal norms across the world through modern times, and culminating, to a certain degree itself, in global acceptance of such norms. The English school has several strengths as a broad framework for understanding the workings, and history, of the international system. It combines recognition of the self-interest and structurally intrinsic competitiveness, which is present in the international system, with an insistence on the other factors, be they customary, legal or ideological, which mitigate and to some degree shape such relations. Its advocacy of a theory of change and its vision of the emergence and spread of the interstate system marks it off as superior to the ahistorical, axiomatic and thereby often banal analysis of conventional realism, while its emphasis on the political, and military, factors that influence international relations gives it an advantage over those theories, be they classical Marxism, or, more recently, dependency theory or world systems theory, which place all of their emphasis on the evolution, itself often mechanically conceived, of the international, capitalist, economy. In several respects, the perspective of the English school is pertinent to contemporary international discussion, especially with regard to reform or transformation of the system. First, in regard to discussion of the role of war, and of the great powers, in international relations it, rightly, insists that these are inexorable, if regrettable, features of interstate relations and that any alternative model of politics and diplomacy that ignores them will be doomed to failure. This is, in the first instance,



Conceptions of ‘International Society’

true of war as a force of historical formation: the very map of states, arbitrarily and accidentally arrived at as it is, is to a considerable degree the result of wars, of battles and of the impositions of the victorious. The character of states, and, not least, their constitutional form, owe much to wars – the history of democratisation in Europe during the twentieth century would be incomprehensible without taking war into account. The same applies to the role of war as an instrument of conquest, and of just change, within international relations. The ideal of humanitarian intervention as it emerged out of the end of the Cold War and the Kuwait crisis of 1990–91 has been massively, when not fatally, tarnished by the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its consequences. However, for those within the liberal and, to a considerable extent, left communities who called for international action over Bosnia and Kosovo, and who later called for such action in Darfur, the reality remained that military operations could be mounted in such situations only with the support, if not active participation, of the US and of the UK. At the same time, the insistence of Hedley Bull and others on the legitimacy, under specific conditions, of war as an instrument of just change, and the very and increasingly open-minded discussion by Bull of the necessary tension between order and justice in international relations, allow for a reassertion of a central feature of international political theory, that of the right to revolt and of just rebellion, something all the more necessary in the context of the conflict between Islamism and the West since 2001. While al Qaeda, their imitators and followers propound a theory, and morality, of non-state violence and revolt that lacks any moral or normative basis, the US and its allies have sought, in their indiscriminate and often self-defeating promotion of a ‘War on Terrorism’, to deny any possible legitimacy to armed resistance, or to groups that, in situations of great national, cultural or political oppression, have no alternative, political, mechanisms with which to articulate their demands. The realism, one could even just say ‘good sense’, of the English school, and its insistence on the enduring primacy, if not monopoly, of states also serves as an essential, if often overridden, corrective to some of the recent literature on global civil society, NGOs and the spread, within globalisation, of non-state networks and linkages. That such processes exist and are, in some ways, increasing within the context of globalisation is true, but the extent of this ‘global civil society’ is often overstated, in an airy invocation of local, networking and anti-systemic groups, as is the degree to which many of the organisations taking advantage of the next international context and the lessening of state controls are in no way candidates for the, implicitly liberal if not emancipatory, gathering



4 Fred Halliday

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of global civil society: conservative religious groups, the mafia, drug traffickers, to name but some are as much, if not more, influential actors on the world scene than are Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the variegated elements of the Porto Alegre anti-globalisation movement. The realism, and very sobriety, of the English school are also of much relevance to the often high-flying and, in the bad sense, utopian debate on the reform of global institutions and governance, starting with the UN. In its historic formation, the English school was, to a considerable degree, engaged in debate with proponents of world government and of the two major bodies that, in part, embodied this ideal, the League of Nations and the United Nations. While not denying to these bodies some purpose and efficacy, in the realms of diplomacy and of establishing norms and laws, the English school tended to downplay the importance of these world bodies, and to stress that within them, in good times (the 1920s, the 1990s) as in bad (the 1930s, Cold War, the 2000s), it was state interest, and in particular the interest of great powers, which prevailed, be it within the organisation or in defiance of it. So much of the literature on this topic, be it in terms of cosmopolitanism, global governance, reform of international institutions or in recurrent appeals for a world government, in the post-1991 period as much as in the 1920s, is simply unrealistic, redolent of liberal, and at times irresponsible, speculation and of little pertinence to how these institutions, old and new, actually function. If, as I fondly hope, and have tried to propose in my own work on the subject, we can recentre the debate on cosmopolitanism and global governance in a manner that takes due note both of idealism and utopianism and of the realities of power and of states, then such a discussion will need the good sense and discipline of the English school, or something like it, to have effect and to carry conviction. Needless to say, the English school framework is far superior to some of the other general theories of the international system that have, in recent times, gained unwarranted currency, notably the Clash of Civilisations, or Post-Modernism. Over and above all of this, as is evident in the IR literature of the past two to three decades, and is equally clear in other contributions to this volume, the English school meets the most important criterion of any academic theory, that of generating a stimulating, in an open and undogmatic way, research agenda. Out of the English school have emerged a wealth of studies, ranging from long-range histories of the interstate system to studies of modern European politics, the foreign policy of individual states, the role of human rights in international affairs, and a sustained engagement with the realities and possibilities of humanitarian intervention (classically Vincent, 1986). In comparison to




most other major paradigms within IR, which are either hobbled by their vacuous, and ahistorical, axioms and structural recurrences, or are based on theoretically unstable and empirically dispersed analytic systems, the English school has shown both continued theoretical and historical vitality, but also a capacity flexibly, soberly and with normative import to engage with the post-Cold War world. Few other paradigms can claim as much.

2 The English school and the Middle East Against this background, it is possible to identify a number of areas in which the analysis provided by the English school, as resumed in Tim Dunne (1998), can serve to illuminate and explain the international relations of the Middle East. In the first place, the modern Middle East as it has emerged since 1918 is a creation in considerable part of external, great power, politics: this goes for the delimitation of the regional map as it emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the very names given to the new territorial creations (‘Iraq’, ‘Syria’, ‘Palestine’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Jordan’) and for the character of the states, first and foremost the ruling elites and armed forces, installed, when not imposed, in these countries. Colonial power as exercised in the newly formed states only served to replicate that already installed in the former Ottoman or peripheral territories seized before the First World War: North Africa, Cyprus, Egypt, Aden, Oman and the smaller Gulf states. Equally great power encroachment before and after the First World War in effect severed the new Turkey, and indeed the Middle East as we have hitherto known it, from areas formerly part of the Muslim and Ottoman lands, the Balkans in south-west Europe, and Transcaucasia between the Caspian and Black Seas. The very visible colonial partition and delimitation of the Arab east after 1918, which was finally recognised in the Lausanne (1923) and Mosul (1926) treaties, had their counterpart in the definitive amputation from the politics of the region of the two hitherto integrated Balkan and Transcaucasian areas (Fromkin, 1989; Yapp, 1996). Second, the international relations of the Middle East since 1918 have been marked, and in the early part of the twentieth century largely determined, by successive interventions of the external powers. Recognition of this should, however, serve to set this issue in a context of accuracy and proportion, to separate myth from plausible realism: one of the most prominent features of the political culture of the region is the overstatement, sometimes to the point of parody or conspiracy theory, of the role



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which external powers have played and are supposed still to play in the region. Thus many Iranians asserted during the 1978–79 revolution that Ayatollah Khomeini was a British agent, and that if you lifted his beard it would say ‘Made in England’ on his chin. Much of the polemical analysis of foreign policy in the region involves the assertion of one or other state being, or having been, a ‘stooge’ or ‘agent’ of some power, be it in the colonial or Cold War period. Thus a recognition of the role of external powers, accurately and proportionately analysed, can provide the basis for a more measured account of the modern international relations of the region, including, where evidence supports the claim, recognition of the autonomy of regional states.3 The role of the external powers in the post-1918 period is, however, indisputable: Britain in its colonial domains, in the suppression of the 1920 and 1941 revolts in Iraq, France in Syria in 1920 and again in Algeria in the independence war of 1954–62, and both in the catastrophic Suez attack, with Israel, in 1956. The US and USSR were to come, in any significant way, rather later to the scene: the US played a diplomatic and covert role in the region during the Cold War, sustaining its allies and intermittently organising coups d’état (Syria 1949, Iran 1953), from the 1960s backing Israel and, less overtly, its other key allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Iran of the shah and Egypt. As the USSR lost influence in the Arab world in the early 1970s, the US, deemed by then Egyptian President Sadat to have ‘99 per cent of the cards’, came to play the leading role in Arab–Israeli negotiations, culminating in the 1979 Camp David agreement. During the Cold War the US sent military missions to a number of countries, and in 1958 its troops landed in Beirut to counter Arab nationalist influence, but it was only after the demise of the Cold War, in Kuwait in 1991, and then in Iraq in 2003, that the US engaged in direct combat, as it had earlier done in Latin America and in East Asia. The influence of the great powers was therefore an important, and recurrent, factor in the modern political and military history of the Middle East and in some cases, as in pleas from Palestinian, Kurdish or Sudanese opposition leaders, the call was for more, not less, US involvement. This influence also extended beyond the confines of international politics to include the structure of states and armies, and, indeed, the aspirations and organisation of the elites. It most certainly included, in one vital respect, the economic development of many of these states: where oil was produced, the character of this industry, its rate of development, output, and the reinvestment of revenues and taxes from oil were all used to strengthen and reform the regional states. The oil industry did little, in itself, to change the economies and societies within




which it was located: rather as a rent-generating enterprise it injected cash into a political and social system that then used this funding for its own, system-maintenance, purposes. In several other respects, the insights of the English school serve the analysis of the Middle East well. One is the insistence on the central role of the state and a robust scepticism about claims for the reality, or desirability, of a reduced state role. Much of modern Middle Eastern history, particularly that of the Arab world, has been taken up with calls for the promotion of greater unity, on a pan-Arab and, intermittently, a pan-Islamic basis. Institutions embodying this aspiration have periodically been established, notably the Arab League (1945) and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) (1969). The aim of Arab, and also Islamic, unity has repeatedly been invoked by states, and, also, against states, by transnational opposition groups, political and military. Yet an informed look at the history of the region in the past decades, and more, as well as a comparative perspective which took into account the very similar experiences of Africa and Latin America would yield a less optative conclusion. First, the formal institutions that are supposed to embody and aggregate the interests of the Arab and Islamic world are ineffectual bodies, little more than talking shops and pretexts for the occasional grandiose conference: neither the Arab League nor the OIC are influential bodies. When it suits the interests of powerful members, such as Egypt in its peace agreement with Israel in 1979 or Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, they simply ignore the Arab League. Second, as even the most benign realist will immediately recognise, calls for ‘unity’ and the promotion of greater coherence of states, economies and societies serve individual state interests: at different times Egypt, Syria and Iraq have promoted Arab unity, but this has been to strengthen their own influence and advance their competition with each other. Saudi Arabia has promoted Arab, but more forcefully Islamic, unity, again to protect itself from rival states and opposition currents and to enhance its interests. At the other end of the power spectrum, weaker and poorer Arab states (Yemen, Jordan, the Comoro Islands) and some states that claim to be Arab even though they are not (Somalia, Djibouti) support schemes for Arab unity and economic cooperation because they think they can secure access to more money through such an association. Third, all attempts at Arab and Islamic unity have failed because, as a result of the formation of separate states in the modern period, separate institutions, interests and identities, as well as separate elites, have emerged. For all the talk of Arab or Islamic commonality, and of artificial



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imperialist partition, the Middle East since 1918 has developed more or less as has Africa and, since the Napoleonic wars, Latin America. From an English school perspective, hopefully enriched with a dose of elementary historical sociological common sense, there should be nothing surprising about this. No one in the Middle East may admit it, but the legal principle applied by the Organisation of African Unity in 1960, uti possidetis, that is states should maintain control over the territory they have at the moment of independence, also applies in the Arab world. Even subregional bodies have been determined by state interests: some, such as the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) embodying Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Yemen, broke up when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990; the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco amounts to almost nothing; the union of Syria and Egypt in 1958 broke apart after a Syrian revolt in 1961; the union of the two Yemens in 1990 was at first artificial and only made real by the conquest of the formerly socialist South by the military dictatorship of the North in a 70-day civil war in 1974. The only, partial, success story is that of the six Gulf monarchies which formed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 1981: these oilproducing and conservative states are held together by the fear of their two unstable and larger neighbours, Iran and Iraq, and maintain formal and, in internal security matters, real collaboration. But on other matters, such as a common currency, or a shared military force, they have continued to diverge. As far as reality is concerned, a robust English school scepticism could also well be applied to much of the discussion recently published about the role of ‘non-state’ actors. Some of the classical candidates for such a role, such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, established in 1964) or the Kurdish guerrilla PKK (1984), are indeed organisations independent of states: but they operate in an environment in which they need, and seek, the support of states and in which they themselves aspire to statehood, if and when it becomes possible. The same applied in earlier times, that is from the 1890s to 1948 to the Zionist movement. In more recent times there has been much talk of the democratisation of the Middle East, the increased role of civil society and NGOs and the emergence of a new, transnational, Islamic media and/or militant community. There have been some significant changes in the region in recent years, facilitated by the IT revolution and external pressure: but many of what are presented as ‘non-state’ actors, be they local NGOs or press and media outlets, are in fact financed and controlled by the government or one part of the ruling family of the state concerned. The example is often given of the TV station al Jazeera: but




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al Jazeera is the TV station of a rich man, the Amir of Qatar, and follows the policies and observes the silences of that state. Its primary goal is to annoy another Arab state, Saudi Arabia. No Arab TV station, and no newspaper, whether published in the region or in London, is free of state control and financing. It is certainly true that young Muslims in the region, as in the West, have shown new interest in what in earlier times were called ‘pan-Islamic’ ideas and a minority have come to engage in a form of radical politics that lacks almost completely any territorial anchor. Yet such transnational and radical aspirations do not necessarily obliterate location in a particular national political context, or a sense of identity that also includes nation and, within the national, locality or region.

3 Coercive diffusion Of greater import, arguably, is the English school emphasis on the forging of an international society through the dissemination of what are, broadly, ‘European values’. There will be some critical comment below on how far this diffusionist image of modern international history can hold, but the initial tenet, that the rest of the world came, in the past two or three centuries, more and more to adopt and use, albeit for their own ends, European norms and values, is indisputably true, as much in politics, diplomacy and international relations as in technology, sport, medicine or economics. In this regard the often repeated accusation that historians or IR specialists are ‘Eurocentric’ usually confuses two things: an illegitimate focus in discussions of international relations only on the interests and narratives of the hegemonic/imperialist West, and a perfectly legitimate historical account of how, over recent centuries, the world was indeed shaped, be it by ‘expansion’ or not, by Europe and its North American associates. On many aspects of this ‘Eurocentric’ account there is little dispute: no one claims that European economic systems, European technology, let alone sport, have not come to dominate the world. In medicine there is a welcome diversity of paradigms, but conventional Western practices prevail. In culture it is the English language, film, TV, music that to date prevail. The same applies, but with a major revision, to the realm of values and political principles: the history of political change in the Middle East over the past 200 years has involved the adoption, if also reformulation, of the core Western principles: sovereignty, economic development, national self-determination. Far too much is made of the supposedly distinct cultural and religious values of Middle Eastern and



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Muslim countries, as if a formally distinct image of, say, banking, human rights, economic redistribution or state forms really yields anything very different. In politics, be it in the statements and practices of conservative monarchies, such as Jordan, Morocco or Saudi Arabia, or in the Islamic military dictatorships of Pakistan or Libya, or in the countries where radical Islam has come to power, be it Iran, Sudan or, intermittently, Afghanistan, the main themes of political discourse and state policy are those of comparable third world states elsewhere. Islam provides a medium and a set of symbols, as well as some retrospective historical legitimation, for the values of these states and of their opponents, but this does not mean that a fundamentally different value system prevails in these countries. All conduct their policies according to a robust realist interpretation of state interest. In no supposedly different cultural or religious context are such universal principles as the right of nations to self-determination or the sovereignty of states formally or even implicitly rejected. This last conclusion may come as some surprise, since the starting point for much recent discussion of the Middle East, in the region and in the West, has been indeed that there are different cultural values involved in political life and interstate relations and that, whether we promote conflict through a Clash of Civilisations or seek common ground through Dialogue of Civilisations, the starting point has to be one of recognising fundamentally different, and separate, value and religious systems. Some scholars, critical of the European and ‘Western’ monopoly over IR debates have come to seek for ‘Non-Western Voices’ in international relations (Gruffydd Jones, 2006).4 A closer, and more scholarly, examination of Middle Eastern political discourses over recent decades and, indeed, over the past two centuries, going back to the time of the French revolution, will show that, for all the apparent differences of principle and proposal, political discussion in the Middle East has been heavily influenced by debates in the wider world, just as it has been focused on dealing with what are very much universal and contemporary issues, to do with the organisation and legitimacy of the state, the development of the economy, the treatment of minorities and different social groups and so forth. The intellectual content, as distinct from political import, of any history of Arab nationalism will show how all the ideas used by such movements derived from European sources. Similarly, a study of women’s mobilisations in twentieth-century Iran demonstrates how it was a variety of imported and, in the case of revolutionary Islamism, confected ideologies that shaped women’s participation in politics (Paidar, 1995). Even the more apparently remote



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and Islamic discourses, such as those of Ayatollah Khomeini or Osama bin Laden, are, on closer examination, not replications of the Qur’an or of any Islamic tradition, but rather modern discourses using tradition and the past for contemporary, to a large extent nationalist, purposes (Abrahamian, 1993). A judicious combination of the English school’s historical and global perspective, with detailed sociological and textual analyses of Islamist writings and statements, will show that Western values, and concerns, diverse and contradictory as they are, have indeed ‘spread’ to the Middle East and elsewhere. The key point to acknowledge here is that there is, in terms of values and norms, no one ‘Western’ system or legacy, but rather, as a result of the very contradictory history of Europe in modern times, a whole gamut of values, from the most hierarchical and authoritarian, to the most revolutionary, that are available to, and which serve to inspire, political actors in other parts of the world. Just as the spread of European states has served to stimulate, in practical terms, nationalist revolt, so the ideological and normative diffusion of European values, from the time of the French revolution, has itself been contradictory. There are great and often conflictual differences of discourse and argument involved in discussions within the Middle East and in those between the region and the West, but these are not formed around cultural differences, so much as differences of interest. On the one side, Arab and other Middle Eastern and Islamic rulers would have no difficulty recognising themselves, their patrons and their rivals in the pages of The Anarchical Society. On the other, those who oppose these rulers, and who also oppose Western influence, shape their arguments in terms of the critical, rebellious and revolutionary values that also emanate from the West: the most influential of all Marxist ideas has been the economic theory of imperialism, the argument that the West is exploiting the third world, and this idea is widespread within nationalist and Islamic discourses in the region. If one examines the texts of guerrilla groups, in Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey or elsewhere, as well as the statements of al Qaeda, it will become clear that much of what they are saying is part of the shared, populist and anti-imperialist, rhetoric of the modern third world, not some restatement of earlier, Muslim, ideas. As for the Walzerian distinction between ‘thick’ domestic and ‘thin’ international values, the reality is that this too ignores the close, and now highly internalised, use of global ideas of rights, legitimacy, territory and struggle within specific national and regional contexts. Once it comes to, say, the demand of the Palestinians for their own state, of Iranians for nuclear weapons, of Iraqis to drive foreign troops out of their country,



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then the supposedly external ‘thin’ can become very cogent, very ‘thick’, indeed. Here it may be objected that, surely, there is a distinctive ‘cultural’ dimension to the politics of the Middle East and of the Arab world, in the form of that very powerful, if diffuse, sense of pan-Arab solidarity, with an aspiration to unity, that has been present in the region since the 1950s. This informs as much the actions, and rhetoric, of states, as it does the aspirations, ever thwarted, of peoples (for example Ajami, 1981; Dawisha, 2003). That this is, and remains, a powerful sentiment in the region is evident, and, despite the political setbacks of past decades, it has in some degree been reanimated by satellite TV, and by the explosion of the Palestine issue since the late 1980s. Arab nationalism has been proclaimed, prematurely, dead on many occasions. Yet this is not an argument for a distinctive cultural character of regional politics: the aspiration to national unity is a widespread, and modern, idea, one imported to the Arab world under the aspiration of nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, and its actual impact on the politics of the region has been determined not by the strength, or ‘thickness’, of any regional specificity, but by the interests of states, which have used unity, or opposition to it (as in Syria in 1961), to further their own interests.

4 Challenges of the sub-global: the Middle East as a ‘region’ The implication of the argument so far is that in regard to what is often seen as the most distinctive feature of the Middle East, namely its distinct political history and its ‘non-Western’ value system, there is little to separate the states system of the region from that of other parts of the world. In terms of interstate relations, regional organisations, the uses of ideology and value and the conduct of conflict, inter- and intra-state, the Middle East, rhetoric and ideological covering apart, poses no new challenges to the student of international relations. It could, indeed, be argued that what is wrong with much of the purely regional analysis is its very methodological regionalism, or nationalism: few who muse on the fate and failure of Arab nationalism ever compare the Arabs to Africans or Latin Americans; students of oil-producing states avoid comparison with Venezuela, Nigeria and Indonesia; those seeking to understand the Islamic Republic of Iran often delve far back into history and culture, but fail to make the comparison that modern history puts squarely on the analytic table, namely that of the relation between revolutionary states and foreign policy.




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As far as the category ‘region’ or ‘sub-global’ is concerned, the Middle East poses no difficulty for the English school. For all the mystified and often exaggerated discussion that emanates from the Middle East about its peculiarity as a region, it is evident that, over recent decades, a relatively distinct subsystem has emerged. Indeed one of the abiding failures of much of the earlier, colonial, post-colonial and Cold War literature on the IR of the region is that it overstated the impact of the external powers and understated how far, from the 1950s at least, regional states had considerable and growing autonomy in their foreign, ideological and domestic politics. No state in the modern Middle East went to war because some external state told them to do so. The term ‘Middle East’ has had relevance and validity as a region, that is a partially integrated political and military space, for over a century, even as the definition of the countries comprising it has varied over time. The term was first coined in 1902 by the US admiral Alfred Mahan in a debate in a London journal with the then LSE lecturer and geopolitician, and later LSE Director, Halford Mackinder (Adelson, 1994). Mackinder, as befitted his approach to IR (for such it was), placed emphasis on the great land masses of the world, in particular on the Central Asian ‘heartland’. Mahan, by analogy with the Far East and with a concern for maritime power, strategy and space, used the term ‘Middle East’ to define the maritime and adjacent land area between Europe and British India. At that time, and until the end of the First World War, the region encompassed the Balkans, part of the Ottoman Empire till 1913 and also Afghanistan. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War the ‘region’ also included Transcaucasia. But the consolidation of the Afghan monarchy under King Amanullah after the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 and his recognition by the USSR (the King of Afghanistan was the first head of state in the world to recognise the Bolshevik state) excluded this country from regional processes until, abruptly, it returned to play an important role after the 1978 communist coup in Kabul. Transcaucasia, comprising Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, was very much part of the region during and after the First World War, but the sealing of the frontier by the USSR after 1921, and the shared interest of Lenin and Atatürk in containing the Armenians, ended this linkage. Even after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 this has to a large extent continued and Turkey has exercised the same restraint as it has over its former dominions in the Balkans. A similar process, of intermittent incorporation and separation, has applied to other adjacent areas: Cyprus, the Horn of Africa and the complex of Western Sahara and Mauritania.



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Beyond geographic nomenclature and regional political discourse, however, it can be argued that the term ‘region’, at least as applied to the Middle East, does have a legitimate historical and analytic usage, and this for three evident reasons. First, states themselves conduct their foreign policies, and manage domestic politics, at least partly in terms of relations with other states in the region, to whom they are linked by issues of security, trade, population movement and ideological legitimation. No state can afford to ignore its neighbours, nor ignore the appeal or more which neighbouring states exercise over its own population. Moreover, events in one country, and prompted by one specific concern, may have regional consequences: the Iranian nuclear programme is, above all, a response to the Pakistani acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1998, but has sparked great alarm in Israel and is stimulating nuclear initiatives in Turkey and some Arab countries. Second, opposition movements, whether explicitly transnational or not, also see the region as a unified space, operating from those states that are favourable to them, building regional support and recruitment networks, and taking inspiration from the action of fellow militants and rebels elsewhere: the regional impact, over the years, of the Palestinian resistance, of Hizbullah in Lebanon, of the Iranian revolution and more recently of the rise of al Qaeda are all examples of this regionalisation of cause and impact. Finally, as the Mahan–Mackinder debate illustrated, external powers treat the region as a unit, seeking to build regional alliances, formal and informal, supporting regional allies, and aspiring to impose their own regional models, most recently in the disastrous US attempt to promote Arab democracy via the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Beyond geographical proximity, and historical and cultural commonality, therefore, the Middle East as a ‘region’ functions at all three of these levels.

5 The low salience of sovereignty If much of the argument of this essay is that the Middle East as a region is not unique or different, beyond the obvious differences that all nations and states, like people, have with each other, there is one area in which a distinctive regional norm operates. This is not, as is conventionally asserted, in the realm of culture or values, but in the realm of foreign policy, and in particular in the predisposition of Middle Eastern states, more than in any other part of the world, to intervene in each other’s internal affairs. This tendency, what I have termed ‘the low salience of sovereignty’, is indeed a remarkable and distinct feature of regional international relations, even if by no means unique to it. A brief look at




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the history of inter-Arab relations over the past half-century will show that all the major Arab states have so intervened: Egypt in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria; Syria in Lebanon and Jordan; Iraq in Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait and Iran; Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Kuwait and, via its Islamist networks, in Egypt and much of North Africa; Libya in Sudan and Tunisia; Algeria and Morocco in the Western Sahara. Even non-state actors like the PLO or, in media terms, Qatar’s al Jazeera have sought significantly to influence the regimes and domestic politics of other states. When we broaden the picture out to include non-Arab states, and relations between them and the Arab world, then further examples follow. Israel on one side, and Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the other, have all fought and coercively intervened in each other. Iran has promoted rebellion in Iraq, under both shah and imam; the shah sent troops to fight the Dhofar rebellion in Oman in 1973; and, after 1979, the Islamic Republic has promoted radical, and armed, movements in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, as well as calling for Islamist militancy across the region. For its part, Turkey, which renounced its former territories in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, and which has been restrained over postcommunist conflicts in parts of the Transcaucasus and the Balkans (that is, not significantly assisting the Chechens and other North Caucasian peoples, or the Bosnians and Kosovars), has nonetheless intervened in regard to three neighbouring states: intermittently in northern Iraq, to pursue the PKK and pressure the local Kurdish groups; massively, and in effect annexing 40 per cent of the island, in the invasion of Cyprus in 1974; and, via support for Baku and imposing a trade embargo on Armenia, in the Azeri–Armenian conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Such a level of sustained intervention and interference, ranging from hostile radio transmissions, bribery and support for opposition political groups, through to promotion of armed rebellion and, in several cases, invasion and annexation, is on a scale unseen anywhere else in the world. For sure, all states to some degree influence their neighbours and others in the region. Interference, at all levels, is a recurrent feature of international relations, and is practised by conservative and even more so by radical and revolutionary states. Recent conflicts in Indochina (1970s), Central America (1980s) and Central Africa (Sudan, Congo, Great Lakes, 1990s and 2000s) all exhibit this tendency. This ‘low salience of sovereignty’ is, however, nothing to do with culture, religion or tradition. Nor is it primarily caused, or related to, the two issues that critics of colonialism often invoke, namely the ‘artificiality’ of states and of frontiers. It is rather a function of the disputed character of the political and social regimes within each state and the uses made of this, and



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the dangers believed to be posed to them, by neighbouring states. To understand this, undoubtedly distinctive, regional norm, dare one say ‘institution’, does not require any voyage into culture, Qur’an or history. It requires an understanding of interstate conflict, of a kind that Messrs Wight, Northedge, Vincent, Bull and others would have immediately understood.

6 The limits of ‘international society’ Discussion so far has concentrated on how an analysis based on the approach of the English school can help to elucidate the international relations of the Middle East. At the same time, and bearing in mind the need, outlined at the beginning of this essay, for a dual and critical interaction of IR theory with regional analysis, any assessment of the English school must recognise the limits, theoretical, historical and normative, of this approach, ones that have been identified in recent decades in a range of writing and which must seriously question the application of this perspective to the study of International Relations. Some of these are well known from the writings of earlier critics and need no lengthy rehearsal here: the lack of any interest in, or understanding of, economics, in the foreign policy of states, or in structuring the international system; the failure to take account of rival histories, and rival associated values, of interstate relations beyond the European–North American arena; the unduly accepting, when not complacent, attitude to the continued domination of world politics by a handful of Second World War victors; the very inaccuracy of terming this approach ‘English’ when few of its major thinkers and exponents themselves are from that country. In some measure too, while orthodox North American realists chide them for positing an international system that is far more benign and rulegoverned than is in fact the case, the English school remains too trapped within the realism that it has sought to modify, above all in its inability to incorporate the analysis of domestic politics, and internal change more generally, within its narrative and in the neglect of the role of ideological and belief factors in international relations. Here, however, I would want to take up some of the other criticisms made of the ‘international society’ approach and to link this assessment of the English school to the analysis of the IR of the Middle East. In particular, I will examine three dimensions of the English school where theoretical and historical re-examination in general, and the particular challenges of the Middle East in particular, require a rethinking of the approach as a whole. First, I will criticise the concept expansion of international society. Second,




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Alternative histories: ‘expansion’ or subjugation The founding myth of the English school, as represented by the work of Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, is its account of the origins and spread of the international system. First, as much recent scholarship has shown, the exaltation, when not fetishisation, of the ‘Westphalian’ system is historically inaccurate, as much as to what happened in 1648 as to how this system spread. Second, the tendency of the original English school, exemplified by Watson and Bull, to offer a diffusionist model, of ‘expansion’, ignores the violence, treachery, subjugation, expropriation and mass murder that accompanied the spread of the European system. This distortion is significant not just in terms of any political or moral balance sheet of European colonial history, but also in terms of explaining the world in which we live today. The European ‘state system’ did indeed spread across the world, but in large measure by defeating, subjugating, forming and deforming the societies and polities with which it came into contact. The difficulties the modern world has with the non-European world are, therefore, not the result of an incomplete spread of Westphalian values, or the resistance of undemocratic, or Islamic, or Asiatic societies and polities to democratic values, but to the very character, and violence, of that spread itself. The briefest of glances at modern Middle Eastern history will illustrate this. Those states that did establish themselves as independent entities after 1918 all did so in military competition with the West and neighbouring powers. The remaining states were not only created and named by the colonial powers, but formed as security apparatuses, designed to control the populations and territories denominated as theirs. In many cases the history of their armed forces, ones created and trained by colonial powers, later by the US and the USSR, amounts to a significant part of the history of the country. When it comes to revolt and resistance, the whole epic saga of Middle Eastern revolution and revolt is one of opposition to the states and regional arrangements created or, in the case of Israel, facilitated by the West. From Palestine since the 1960s and Lebanon since the 1980s, to Iraq after 2003, it has been revolt against the imposition of external powers which has fuelled rebel movements. In other conflicts, most evidently the Iran–Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, the root cause lies in the collision of two revolutions, that of Iraq in 1958



I will question the historical perspective of the English school, arguing that it posits a misleading continuity in the development of the international system. Third, I will examine the sociological categories used, often without adequate definition, by the English school.

and that of Iran in 1979, against the regimes and state system imposed in colonial and Cold War times. In this context, there is an obvious example of how analysis of one region, in this case the Middle East, can challenge the broader theory, in that it comes up against one of the enduring limitations of the English school. The history of the subjugation of the region, as of Africa, Asia and Latin America, involves not just political, military and normative issues, the chosen terrain of the English school, but also economics: indeed the whole study of imperialism has been determined in large measure by a debate between those who give primacy to the strategic, and those who focus on economic factors in the expansion and functioning of the system.5 Divergent historical perspectives The second constitutive error within the English school approach to international relations, and to history as a whole, lies in its acceptance of a continuous historical narrative of international and interstate relations going back centuries and millennia. Influenced, when not besotted, by classical Greece and Rome, as well as by the history of medieval and modern Europe, and, more recently, expanding its horizons to encompass India and China, the writers of the English school tend to ignore the fundamental lesson of social science and of history informed by it, namely the radical difference, and rupture, that divides the modern, roughly post-1800 world from that which precedes it. At the same time, the ahistorical continuism of the English school and the failure to take account of the discontinuities and ruptures in politics and international relations serves to reinforce the separate, essentialist and Orientalist, premise that the politics of the Middle East in particular can be explained by values, religious and state forms of earlier times. By contrast, the insistence of writers such as Karl Polanyi in economic history, of Ernest Gellner in sociology and of Eric Hobsbawm in history on the great divide that separates the pre-modern and modern worlds entails that we cannot write of political and social categories, be they market, state, family, economy or war, in abstract, or treat superficially similar instances of any one of these from different centuries and epochs as meaningfully similar. At the same time, this insistence on the modernity of social and political phenomena undercuts the methodological premise of much of the literature on the Middle East that resorts to history and a timeless concept of culture, above all to some abstracted ‘Islam’ to explain contemporary politics and ideas. In contrast to such culturalist explanations, which are at least as rife in the region as they are in the West, it entails that the latter must always be seen first in their contemporary context and not explained




Fred Halliday

by reference to events, values or texts that predate the modern era. Part of modernity is, of course, to invoke tradition, and the past, and, very much in recent times, to explain social and political behaviour by reference to other areas (the Qur’an, the Christian legacy of Europe, Asiatic despotism), but this invocation is itself a modern reflex, a deployment of elements from the past for present purposes. When we turn to the Middle East the implications of these two alternative historical visions become at once evident. The continuist approach favoured by the English school would, in the first place, tend to explain the behaviour of Middle Eastern states in terms of patterns of interstate relations going back centuries, if not millennia, and, in so doing, also reinforce the separate but often associated tendency, variously termed essentialist or Orientalist, that explains the behaviour of Middle Eastern and Muslim states in terms of their religious, cultural and dynastic pasts. By contrast, a modernist and ruptural account of the Middle Eastern state system would see it as, above all, a creation of modern history, of, first, the impact of European colonialism in its military and economic forms on the Ottoman and Persian Empires in the one or two centuries leading up to the First World War, and then, most importantly, of the delineation, in effect founding, of the modern state system in the aftermath of the First World War. Thus, while, of the 25 or so states of the modern Middle East, the majority were in the post-1918 period colonial states, ruled and shaped by their European masters (UK, France, Italy), the remaining four were also products of this modern and competitive interstate system and of the post-1918 international conjuncture that shaped it. Thus in Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the only four states in the region that were not under colonial rule in the 1920s, new states emerged, with militarised systems and seeking to sustain their independence as states within a new regional context. Sociological foreclosure The third major difficulty with the English school is the use it makes of sociological categories, and the issues, historical and analytic, which it forecloses by such usage. In an earlier text (Halliday, 1987) and in my study of the role of social upheaval in international relations I have sought to show how, by deploying the categories of international and historical sociology, but respecting some of the major insights of the English school, it may be possible to elaborate a more cogent explanation of international relations, and also, this itself being one of the aspirations of the English school, establish an analytic space within which normative issues can more effectively be discussed. In my overview of the IR of



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the Middle East I have tried to apply this broad, historical sociological, approach to the Middle East (Halliday, 2005a).6 To summarise: three of the central concepts of the English school derive their definition and authority from sociological literature: state, society and norms. So too does the concept of ‘socialisation’, often used to explain the spread, and acceptance, of the Westphalian system. The concept of the state is however limited to a territorial and juridical abstraction, and does not allow for examination of how the state, in terms of the institution of military and administrative control, is established, develops and functions. Among other problems, this monolithic and abstracted concept of the state precludes an analysis of how domestic factors, and the internal structure of the state, affect foreign policy. The concept of society is also fatally flawed, since it assumes shared values between a set of formally distinct actors: but society can also be seen, and it can be argued more accurately seen, as a site of conflict between different interests, above all between the more and less powerful, and the spread of values as an attempt by one party, usually those with power, to impose their values on those who have less. Here socialisation is not the voluntary and gradual acceptance of norms, Westphalian or other, but the means by which a ruling class or dominant state imposes its values on the subordinated classes and seeks to present these values as the only available ones, as natural, eternal and immutable. Norms themselves are not simply diffused, in some consensual and cooperative manner: rather, in the case of the values of the rulers, they are imposed, even as, through appropriation of the usually contradictory character of the value system, other, more radical, ideas are diffused. In this way those who are so dominated use counter-hegemonic ideas, such as nationalism, revolution or rights or another reading of the hegemonic values themselves, to articulate opposition and resistance, and to proclaim their own entitlement: when the Egyptian leader Sa‘ad Zaghlul, the Kurdish delegates, Ho Chi Minh and others came to Versailles in 1919 to demand independence for their countries they were using the very elements of resistance contained within Western discourse to demand justice. Herein lies the success, and the paradoxical outcome, of what I have termed above ‘coercive diffusion’.

7 Conclusion: the English school and the Middle East, two major revisions Enough has been written above to show how, once the core sociological categories of the English school are reassessed, it becomes possible




Fred Halliday

to offer a different, and not entirely incompatible, account of the international system. As far as the Middle East is concerned, this involves two major revisions of contemporary IR accounts of the regional. First, on the matter of norms and values it is no longer a question of counter-posing ‘Western’, ‘Westphalian’ or other values to those of the Middle East, but rather of seeing how, over the past two centuries, a regional discourse incorporating elements of Western discourse, statist and anti-statist alike, into regional politics and rearticulating them in terms of the national entities, state interests, local languages and discourses, and movements of resistance and revolution, present in the region. A rethinking of the sociology of the international system, combined with an informed, as opposed to voyeuristic, study of national and religious discourses in the Middle East, permits us to escape from many of the misleading contemporary debates on this question. The second major revision involves placing at the centre of IR in general, and of the Middle East in particular, the role of social movements, and, more generally, the historical impact of revolt and revolution.7 To stress the latter is not to glorify or simplify what such processes involve, or to suggest that those who initiate such processes control or anticipate the outcome: it is, however, in the Middle East as elsewhere to recognise something that IR in general, and the English school in particular, have long denied, which is the central, formative, role of revolution in the shaping of the modern international system: globally, we need only think of the impact of France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959; regionally, the history of the Middle East over the past century has involved the intersection of three major, recurrent and contradictory, processes – the impact of the external, ‘great’, powers; the autonomous and competitive actions of regional states; and the incidence of social and political rebellion, from the upheavals in Persia and Turkey in the 1900s, through the Egyptian, Iraqi, Algerian, Yemeni and Libyan revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, to the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, to the impact of both the Afghan communist and Islamist jihad movements in Afghanistan from 1978 onwards. The whole modern history of the region, and the very issues at play in the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Palestine, Turkey and Sudan, involve a recognition of all three of these formative dimensions, with, in regard to the last category, as yet uncertain outcomes. What such analysis requires, however, is analysis that uses historical sociological and regional study, amplifying, but in some important respects remaining true to, the core insights of the English school. Thus may the original concern of this essay, the interaction of general theory with the study of specific



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regions, ‘the double challenge’, be fruitfully explored, and to the benefit of both.

1. For an elaboration of this ‘double challenge’ see Halliday, 2005a: Chapters 1 and 2. 2. In what follows I focus my argument on what I refer to as the ‘classical’ variant of the English school, in no way gainsaying the development that on some issues, such as colonialism, and the role of global economic structures, later writers such as Buzan and Little (2000), Keene (2002) and Buzan (2004) have taken the English school further. 3. On the increasing autonomy of the regional states, especially as the Cold War progressed, see Halliday, 2005a: Chapter 5, and a range of other works that converge in overall analysis, by eliciting the room for manoeuvre and relative independence of regional states, among them Tibi (1998); Gerges (1994); Yapp (1996); Fawcett (2005). 4. The problem with this literature is that it often treats at face value as ‘nonWestern’ what are, in fact, in provenance Western, but at the same time radical and anti-systemic, views and forms of resistance. The cover of this book is an example, showing a third world protest meeting but with slogans, written in Portuguese, denouncing, in roundly universalist radical terms, imperialism. This slogan, far from being specific to any particular country or culture, could be deployed in any of 180 countries in the world. 5. To their credit some later English school writers have sought to remedy the English school’s blindness on the issue of colonialism and military conflict: Buzan and Little (2000); Keene (2002); Keal (2003); Buzan (2004). How far this revision is agglutinative, and not such as to undermine the whole historical, social and moral fabric of the English school, is, however, debatable. My own earlier critiques of the English school would suggest that if the triad of core categories – state, society, norms – is recast to take account of the systematic violence and subjugation accompanying the spread of the European model then the intellectual system as a whole, beset by these, in Kuhnian terms, ‘anomalies’, will come crashing down. On the role of violence in constituting and underpinning the modern international system see Wallerstein (1983); Cocker (1998). 6. Parallel attempts to write the modern history of the region in terms of political sociology include Bromley (1994); Kamrava (2005); Pappe (2005). For an excellent historical narrative of the region see Yapp (1996). 7. This I have tried to do, to little evident effect!, within IR as a whole, in Halliday (1999).



Notes

2 Barry Buzan

Introduction In Chapter 1 Fred Halliday has given his personal overview of the English school and its strengths and weaknesses as an approach to studying the Middle East. This chapter takes up the challenge of sketching out in detail the theoretical elements for applying social structural concepts from English school theory to the Middle East. The specific aim is to underpin a division of labour among the other chapters in this book to investigate whether or not significant, distinct, international social structures exist at the regional level represented by the Middle East in either or both of the forms identified by the English school: a society of states, or a ‘world’ society rooted in the peoples and non-state actors of the region. If such social structures do exist, how strong are they, and how distinct from the structures at the global level? How do such structures at the regional level interplay both with those at the global level and with other regional-level structures? Section 1 sets out the concepts and vocabulary as they will be used in this book. Section 2 reviews the theoretical issues raised by applying English school concepts at the regional level. Section 3 gives a brief portrait of the international and world society at the global level within which the Middle East is located. Section 4 sets out the logic of the rest of the chapters in relation to the concepts set out in section 1. It also anticipates some difficulties for the application of English school theory to the Middle East, or indeed any other region, arising from underdevelopment of certain aspects of the theory. Part of the purpose of this book is precisely to focus attention on those aspects so that we can return to them in Chapter 10 and evaluate what looking at the Middle East case tells us about English school theory. 24



The Middle East through English School Theory


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Not everyone reading this book will be familiar with English school concepts and vocabulary, and there is still some confusion and disagreement among those who are familiar with them. This book also departs somewhat from the classical English school usages along the lines developed by Buzan (2004). So at the risk of a somewhat dry start, I will set out here the key terms both in their classical form and in their usages as they will appear both in the rest of this chapter and in the rest of the book. Classical English school thinking rests on a triad of concepts which taken together are understood as representing all the main dimensions of international relations: • international system – refers generally to the macro side of the interac-

tions that tie the human race together, and more specifically to the interactions among states. Its usage in classical English school thinking is close to that in realism, being about power politics among states within a political structure of international anarchy, and is sometimes referred to as realism or Hobbesianism. The term is often used as a counterpoint to ‘international society’ because it suggests a mechanical analogy in which there is interaction among the units of the system, but no society. • international society – refers to the institutionalisation of shared interest and identity among states, and puts the creation and maintenance of shared norms, rules and institutions at the centre of IR theory. Synonyms for international society are rationalism and Grotianism. It is therefore a more developed form of international system in which there are rules and institutions that mediate the interaction (more on this below). • world society – takes individuals, non-state organisations and ultimately the global population as a whole as the focus of global societal identities and arrangements, and puts transcendence of the state system at the centre of IR theory. Synonyms are revolutionism and Kantianism. This triad has served reasonably well for conducting normative and political theory analyses in the English school tradition, but it lacks the sharpness necessary to do a social structural analysis of real existing international and world societies. World society in particular has so many different interpretations, some of them overlapping significantly with international society, as to be almost useless for guiding empirical



1 English school terminology and concepts

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applications. In what follows we will use a more precise set of terms to label three domains of society based on the type of unit that comprises them. The term domains will always refer to one or more of these three:

above, but makes clearer that it is restricted to what happens between and among states. • transnational society – refers to social structures composed of non-state collective actors such as firms or civil (or uncivil) society actors such as Amnesty International (or al Qaeda). • interhuman society – refers to social structures based on interactions among individual human beings, and in this book mainly manifested as large-scale patterns of shared identity such as religions or civilisations or humankind as a whole. Given this emphasis on three domains, we will use the now liberated term international society to refer to all of these together: the whole pattern of large-scale social structure. We will use world society to refer to the non-state domains taken collectively. There are two other terms from classical English school theory that we will use broadly within their conventional meanings: • pluralism – defines interstate societies with a relatively low degree of

shared norms, rules and institutions among the states, where the focus of society is on creating a framework for orderly coexistence and competition, or possibly also the management of collective problems of common fate (for example arms control, environment). Pluralism generally reflects a conservative view of international society which sees its potential as constrained by the system logic of realism to not more than a limited pursuit of coexistence. • solidarism – defines international societies with a relatively high degree of shared norms, rules and institutions among states, where the focus is not only on ordering coexistence and competition, but also on cooperation over a wider range of issues, whether in pursuit of joint gains (for example trade), or realisation of shared values (for example human rights, environmental stewardship). Solidarism generally reflects a more liberal or progressive view of international society which sees its potential as essentially open, and in principle capable of extending beyond coexistence into cooperation and even convergence. The EU can be taken as a model of a solidarist international society. Contemporary solidarism is mainly liberal in inspiration,



• interstate society – means the same as international society as defined


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Finally, there are two terms that are new to both IR generally and the English school in particular, but which speak to a well-understood and not controversial distinction which has previously lacked a label: • primary institutions – The institutions talked about by the English

school as constitutive of both states and international society in that they define both the basic character and the purpose of any such society. This type of institution is evolved rather than designed, constitutive rather than instrumental, and can be found as far back as one can trace the history of states in its broadest sense. The classical (pluralist) institutions are: sovereignty, non-intervention, territoriality, diplomacy, international law, war, balance of power and great power management. Nationalism and the market are more recent additions, and solidarists are promoting, with some but by no means complete success, human rights and democracy. Classical civilisations had some distinctive institutions such as suzerainty, or in China the tribute system (Zhang, 2001). • secondary institutions – The institutions talked about in regime theory and by neoliberal institutionalists are the products of certain types of international society (most obviously liberal, but possibly other types as well). They are consciously designed to serve the instrumental purposes of the entities that create them, and they are with very few exceptions not older than the mid-nineteenth century. In the interstate domain they are intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) such as the UN and the WTO. In the transnational domain they are (con)federative bodies such as the umbrella organisations that oversee world football or chess or peace movements or banks or many other lobbying or interest groups.

2 Applying English school concepts to the regional level: theoretical issues There are very few attempts in English school literature to explore the regional manifestations of international social structure, exceptions being Ayoob (1999), Diez and Whitman (2000), Stivachtis (2002) and Czaputowicz (2003: 30–9). In general, the idea has been either marginalised or resisted. Critics have argued that this position is both theoretically untenable and damaging to English school theory (Zhang, 2002: 6–7; Buzan, 2004: 205–12). The underlying issue is the scale or



and so normally assumes interlinked developments across the three domains, and not just in the interstate domain.

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scales on which it is appropriate to think about ‘international’ or ‘world’ societies in the interstate, interhuman and transnational domains. In classical English school thinking, the fixation on the global scale arose from a combination of the history of the expansion of European interstate society; the influence of universal normative principles in political theory; a fear, amplified by the Cold War, that regional developments would necessarily be in conflict and so undermine global ones; and a blindness to empirical developments of international society in both the EU and the world economy. The argument in this section is that this neglect of the regional level of social structure is unnecessary and unhelpful. In the interstate domain, the classic English school definition of international society has as its referent ‘a group of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political communities) . . .’ and this specification leaves entirely open the question of scale. In the interhuman and transnational domains, Bull’s infrequently cited definition of world society, unlike his frequently cited one of international society, does make the global requirement explicit: By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interaction linking all parts of the human community to one another, but a sense of common interest and common values on the basis of which common rules and institutions may be built. The concept of world society, in this sense, stands to the totality of global social interaction as our concept of international society stands to the concept of the international system. (Bull 1977: 279 my italics) Neither of these positions is well thought through, and my argument is that there is every reason to expect that one will find social structures, both interstate and ‘world’, at both global and regional levels. Looking first at the interstate domain, it is pretty clear that a globalscale pluralist interstate society exists on the basis of effectively universal acceptance of basic Westphalian institutions such as sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy and international law. But it is just as clear that this global society is unevenly developed to a very marked degree. Moving on from Vincent’s famous egg-box metaphor of international society (in which states were the eggs, and international society the box), one might see this unevenness as a pan of fried eggs. Although nearly all the states in the system belong to a thin, pluralist interstate society (the layer of egg-white), there are regional clusters sitting on that common substrate that are both much more thickly developed than the global common, and up to a point developed separately and in different ways



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from each other (the yolks). The EU and North America, for example, both stand out as regional interstate societies that are more thickly developed within themselves. Lesser attempts to create thicker, liberal, regional interstate/international societies by cultivating joint economic development can be found in Mercosur, and various other regional economic cooperations. Above some of these regional efforts one can find larger, looser, thinner versions of the same thing labelled the ‘West’ or the ‘Atlantic Community’ or the ‘Asia-Pacific’. Different forms of relative thickness compared to the global common, reflecting concerns with more political and/or cultural values, can be found by looking at the arrangements of ASEAN, or among the community of Islamic states, or the Arab League. There is thus strong empirical evidence, particularly but not only in the economic sector, that distinctive development of interstate societies is flourishing at the sub-global level. The need to look at the regional level is just as obvious if one turns to the interhuman and transnational domains. Interhuman society is largely about collective identity (Buzan, 2004: 118–38). Most national identities are geographically clustered to a substantial degree, as, to a lesser extent, are most religious and civilisational identities. Since individual humans often hold more than one identity simultaneously, the question is how the patterns of distribution overlap, and which takes priority as a mobiliser or legitimator of political action. Some identities will fit inside others, like Russian dolls (for example Danish, within Scandinavian, within European, within Western), whereas others may be relatively diffuse, and have complicated patterns of overlap (for example religious identities in relation to ethno-national ones). Looking at the interhuman domain through this lens what one sees, in a very broadbrush picture, is an inverse correlation between scale on the one hand, and the intensity of shared identity on the other. Families, clans, tribes and nations mostly shine strongly, whereas humankind, or members of the planetary ecosystem, are still little more than background glow (albeit up from nothing in the quite recent past). There are exceptions to this pattern. Some national identities embrace huge numbers of people and large territories. A handful of religions, most notably Christianity and Islam, have succeeded in creating vast subsystemic communities of shared identity. Some civilisations (Western, Confucian) hold similarly sized scale, but less intensely. In matters of identity, parochialism still rules. Despite some breakthroughs to larger-scale, universal-scale identity remains strikingly weak. In matters of identity, the regional ‘yolks’ rest on the very thin and very recent substrate of ‘white’ provided by the general acceptance that all human beings are equal. Prior to the onset of




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general decolonisation after the Second World War, it was normal practice for humans formally and legally to locate each other in hierarchic categories of superior and inferior, whether defined by race, culture, caste or master–slave relations. Transnational society is almost by definition less amenable to geographical classification than either interhuman or interstate society. Nevertheless, and again in very broad brush, the view is one in which higher intensities of norms, rules and institutions are found on the smaller scales than on the larger ones. Clubs, firms, lobbies, associations and suchlike are all for the most part more intensely organised locally than globally. In the transnational realm of society, it is possible to achieve large, even global, scale in an extremely thin way. The network of scholars interested in the English school, for example, amounts to a few hundred people at best, yet having ‘members’ on all continents can plausibly claim to be ‘global’. It is an empirical question whether developments in interaction capacity such as the internet tend more to support thin global developments in the transnational domain, or also boost the development of regional non-state actors (NSAs). In sum, the regional level is firmly occupied in the interstate and interhuman domains and perhaps in the transnational one. Interestingly, echoing the insight of Williams (2001), the global level is reasonably well developed only in the interstate domain. The diplomatic and political structure of global international society, and the regimes and institutions of the global economy, are altogether more substantial than the faint glow of shared identity as humankind. There is, as globalisationists constantly stress, more of a challenge in the transnational domain, where NSAs are increasingly organising themselves not just within states, but on a global scale. By marginalising regional developments, the English school has sustained an emaciated conceptualisation of what the whole idea of international/world society is about. International society at the global level is almost inevitably thin, but as most strongly shown by the EU, regional developments may well be much thicker. The whole framework of interstate, interhuman and transnational societies needs to be understood as the interplay between regional and global levels. If one accepts the validity of applying English school concepts of social structure to both the global and regional levels, then three sets of theoretical issues arise. The first concerns the relationship between the interstate and non-state domains within any particular instance of regional-level international social structure; the second concerns the interplay between international society at the regional level and that at the global one; and



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the third concerns the interplay between and among the three domains across different regions.

There are two parallel arguments about the local relationship between the interstate and non-state domains. The first is the widespread position in the English school classics that shared culture is an important, perhaps even necessary, underpinning for interstate society. As Wight (1977: 33) puts it: ‘We must assume that a states system [that is an interstate society] will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members.’ Ancient Greece and modern Europe are the key examples of this relationship. In the European case the link generates the whole concern in the English school literature that the expansion of international society from Europe to the world has weakened it by introducing a dose of multiculturalism that is potentially fatal to shared norms, rules and institutions. To the extent that this is true, we might expect to find thicker and more robust interstate societies on regional scales defined by shared culture. That is one reason for looking at the Middle East, where both Arabism and Islam provide possible shared-culture foundations. The second argument linking the interstate and non-state domains derives from Weller (2000: 64–8), who notes that the relationship between society (in the contractual, instrumental sense of Gesellschaft) and community (in the organic shared-identity sense of Gemeinschaft) depends significantly on whether their geographical boundaries are the same or different. Bringing the geography of society and community into line has of course been the driving rationale behind the nationstate. Where community and society occupy the same space, as in a classical nation-state, the element of identity (for example nationalism) may well play a crucial role in balancing some of the divisive effects of society and politics (for example the class antagonism generated by capitalist economies; the need for political parties to play the role of loyal opposition when out of power). But where identity and society are not in the same space, as in the contemporary problematique of globalisation, they might well be antagonistic forces (for example nationalist reactions against economic liberalism). Thinking in this vein supports the English school case that the existence of community facilitates the formation of interstate societies. Whether or not this works the other way around, with a society of states necessarily, or even usually, leading towards the formation of a matching sense of community, is a much more open question. This issue underlies the English school’s concerns about the



The local relationship between the interstate and non-state domains

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weakness of shared culture underpinning contemporary global international society. This relationship between shared culture and interstate society should be as important at the regional level as at the global one: as, for example, in the problem of how to press on with European integration when the interstate mechanisms have outrun the rather weak sense of European identity among the peoples of the EU. Huntington’s (1996) worrying ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis fits here, made all the more alarming by the escalation of securitisation between the Islamic world and the West that followed on from September 11. Also under this heading are things such as Asian values and the ‘ASEAN way’, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism and pan-Africanism and any other attempts to ascribe a political quality to a cultural zone. In a general sense, all of this can be understood as being about how political, economic and cultural geography play into each other. At the macro-level, interest focuses on the relationship between the larger patterns in the interhuman domain, and the sub-global and global social structures in the interstate domain. Do regional interstate developments follow the cultural patterns in the interhuman domain, as they appear to do, for example, within ‘the West’, and if so how closely tied are these two factors? Are there interstate societies which correspond to other cultural or civilisational zones such as Islam or the Arab world? Weller’s implicit hypothesis is that identity on the one hand, and the machineries of rational contractual relations on the other, more easily reinforce each other when they occupy the same territorial space, and provide grounds for conflict when they do not. This idea, and its accompanying assumption that the three domains are generally present in any large-scale social structure, seems an excellent starting point for almost any enquiry into the social structure at any level. The interregional and global interplay of social structures The second and third sets of theoretical issues can be considered together. The second concerns the interplay between the social structures at the regional level and those at the global one. The traditional English school position, drawing heavily on the Cold War context of its time, was that sub-global international societies like those represented by East and West would almost inevitably fall into struggle for universal dominion, in the process wrecking interstate society at the global level until one of them emerged victorious. The third set concerns the interplay between and among social structures at the regional level. Because the traditional English school literature did not much consider the sub-global level, focusing almost exclusively on the global/universal level, there is as yet



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little development in this area. In practical terms it is anyway beyond the resources of this book to assess systematically how the Middle Eastern international society interacts with all of its many neighbours. The first task is to question the assumption that regional international societies must automatically be in rivalry for global status. The evidence from contemporary interstate society suggests a much more open spectrum of possibilities of how regional developments might impact on each other and on global interstate society. As the fried-eggs metaphor emphasises, there is no simple ‘either/or’ choice about global and regional developments. In the contemporary international system, the thinner global interstate society is shared by all, and the regional developments build on top of that. What might be thought of as a second-order pluralism is possible when regional interstate societies seek rules of coexistence with each other at the global level. The key to this second-order pluralism is the desire to express and maintain zones of cultural and political difference without seeking to expand them to global dominance. Cultural zones driven by universal ideologies, as in the Cold War, might very well fall into rivalry to capture the global level. But there are clearly no grounds (other than an ideological commitment to a machtpolitik view of the world) for any automatic assumption that regional developments must fall into such rivalry. Regional cultural logics such as ‘Asian values’, Hindutva, Europe or pan-Arabism are almost by definition not universalist, and so might well lend themselves to a pluralist logic of coexistence. Islam, or in earlier times Christendom, falls somewhere between with potential to be captured either by universalist or communitarian interpretations. The fried-egg metaphor suggests that regional societies would rest on, and share, the common ‘white’ representing the global level. This metaphor carries the implication that there is a substantial degree of compatibility between the societal developments at the regional level and those at the global level. If no such compatibility exists, then the global level itself does not exist and the classical English school assumption of rivalry would be in play. To say compatibility must exist is not to imply that harmony must exist among the regional societies, only that they must agree to share some institutions. In principle, the nature of the relationships both among the regional societies, and between them and the global level, remains open and historically contingent. It is even possible for regional interstate societies to be strong rivals, as they were during the Cold War, and yet still share adherence to some global-level institutions (sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy, great power management). Such second-order pluralism could encompass intersocietal relations ranging




Barry Buzan

from friendship through indifference to hostility. Regional international societies lose their point if there are no significant differences between them and either their neighbours or the global level. But if the differences become too great then the global level disappears. The hypothesis assumed in some English school writings that regional societal developments must necessarily be rivals or necessarily degrade the global level is thus just one of many possibilities. In contemporary international society one can identify quite a few regional international societies, and most are quite well in tune with the institutions at the global level. One purpose of looking in detail at the Middle Eastern case is to investigate the source and nature of the compatibilities and differences between one particular regional international society and the global one. The fantasies of some extreme Islamists apart, there are currently no competing universalisms of the type that so worried Bull and Wight. It can certainly be argued that the West, and particularly the US, sees itself as a universalism, and that this has a quasi-imperial character inasmuch as the US and others try to impose their values and institutions onto the rest of the world. But unlike during the Cold War, the other regional interstate societies are mainly concerned with maintaining their distinctiveness at the regional level, not trying to remake the global level in their own image. They may welcome some elements of the Western model (particularly sovereignty), but resist elements of it with which they disagree. One thing made possible by identifying a regional level of international society, and asking how social structures at that level interact with each other and the global level, is a much more nuanced and useful view of the heated debate about intervention than that offered either by the traditional universalist English school view or indeed by any other IR theory. If it is possible to build distinctive regional international societies on the common foundations provided by global international society, then this arrangement frames the issue of intervention in the form of three questions: (a) How legitimate/legal within the global rules and norms is intervention in any part of the system: that is the lowest common denominator of interstate society? (b) How legitimate/legal is intervention within the rules and norms of a given regional interstate society such as EU-Europe or the Arab League? (c) How legitimate/legal is intervention across the boundary between distinctive regional interstate societies: for example from the West



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Questions about the legitimacy and legality of intervention relate so intimately to the issue of sovereignty that it is impossible to separate them. But sovereignty means different things at the pluralist and solidarist ends of interstate society. In a pure Westphalian interstate society, virtually all intervention is both illegal and illegitimate (except against forces aiming to disrupt or overthrow the interstate order). In a thick, solidarist international society such as that represented by the EU, the agreed unpacking of sovereignty, and the establishment of agreements about elements of justice, and the rights of individuals and non-state actors makes many more kinds of intervention both legal and legitimate. There may be many inbetween cases where legality and legitimacy part company, as in aspects of the recent Western interventions in the Balkans (Wheeler, 2000). Since interstate society is de facto differentiated quite radically at the regional level, it is absurd to confine a discussion of the de jure aspects of intervention by imposing an assumption that interstate society is a single, global-scale phenomenon. Each intervention has to be considered in relation to the specific characteristics of its location, and whether it is within a regional society, or crosses boundaries between such societies. If NATO’s intervention in former Yugoslavia had been presented and understood as an affair of European/Western interstate society, it would have triggered much less resistance from China and others who feared it might be setting a global precedent. Another thing revealed by a layered view of international social structure is the vanguardist potential in such an arrangement. By vanguard I mean the idea common to both military strategy and Leninist thinking that a leading element plays a crucial role in how a social movement unfolds. A vanguard theory of how interstate society expanded is implicit in the way the English school has presented the story of the European/Western interstate society becoming global. The triumph of European power meant that Western norms and values and institutions dominated the whole system. The mixture of coercion and copying and persuasion is inherent in a vanguard model, and runs in close parallel to Waltz’s (1979) idea that anarchy generates ‘like units’ through processes of ‘socialisation and competition’. The vanguard model also has similarities to the idea that hegemonic states like the UK and the US act to spread values, though the vanguard model is more core–periphery based: less centred in a single hegemonic state, and more the outcome of a hegemonic interstate society. The Westphalian model was spread to the



into Africa, Asia or the Middle East, or from any of these three latter into each other?

Barry Buzan

non-Western world not by one state, but by all of the Western colonial powers. Outsiders might emulate the core for several reasons additional to direct coercion. They might simply be overawed, and copy in order to conform and to obtain the same results. They might be persuaded by normative argument. They might emulate for competitive reasons, fearing loss of relative wealth or power if they fail to adapt, and hoping to outdo the vanguard at its own game. Whatever the mechanisms and whatever the rationales, the effect is one of a sub-global vanguard leading a global development. Several of the values that were carried outward by the force of Western military superiority have, over time, become internalised by those states and up to a point by peoples on whom they were originally imposed. Nationalism, territorial sovereignty, international law, diplomacy and science are the most obvious examples, joined more recently, and perhaps still controversially, by the market. What starts out as imperial imposition can become internalised and accepted by those on whom it was imposed. Looking at international society in this way begins to offer some leverage on the question arising from Weller’s analysis left open above, as to whether the existence of interstate societies can promote the development of community in the corresponding interhuman domain. There is, however, nothing inevitable about this, and imposition can just as easily breed rejection (as the demise of the Soviet Union demonstrated in relation to communist ideology). The US occupation of Iraq in 2003, with its aim of promoting democracy in the Arab world, certainly fits in the vanguardist mould (and at the time of writing looks like a failed test of whether coercion can change values). The neo-imperial qualities inherent in the present condition of interstate society are noticed by Nye (1990: 166–7) when he argues that the US ‘needs to establish international norms consistent with its society’, and get ‘other countries to want what it wants’. The US is perhaps unique in the degree to which it is explicit about wanting to impose its values on others for their own benefit, but history suggests that it is not unusual for dominant powers and cultures to think and behave towards that end. This vanguard aspect is an important element in how the international social structures in the Middle East (often seen as a key site of resistance to Westernisation) relate both to the West (as a neighbouring regional international society) and to the global level (largely formed by Western values and interests). The English school literature is largely dominated by liberal values, but one has to keep in mind that liberal values are not universally dominant. The international social structures of the classical Islamic or Chinese worlds, however one might best describe their mix



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of interhuman, transnational and interstate, were certainly not liberal. Other sorts of values are still in play worldwide, and at the regional level, for example still in the Islamic world and also in much of East Asia liberal values are not dominant within the local international societies. If we are going to bring the regional level back into the study of international social structures, then these non-liberal alternatives are of more than historical interest. They are important components in a layered international social structure in which some norms and institutions are shared and some not. Furthering our understanding of how these compatible and incompatible elements work together is one good reason for examining the Middle East more closely through an English school lens.

3 The global social structures We need first to sketch out briefly what the international social structures look like at the global level, in order to see in subsequent chapters how the states and peoples of the Middle East fit into them. Contemporary global international society The framework to be used in this book builds on the social structural approach to English school theory set out in Buzan (2004: Chapters 6–8). Building on terminology set out in section 1 above, the key conceptual elements relevant here are as follows: • A division of the international social world into three domains each

defined by a different type of actor: interstate, transnational and interhuman. This generates two types of society: first order (in which the members are individual human beings) and second order (in which the members are not individual human beings, but durable collectivities of humans possessed of identities and actor qualities that are more than the sum of their parts). The distinctive contribution of English school theory is to focus on second-order societies, particularly interstate societies, and how they relate to first-order ones. • A distinction is between primary and secondary institutions as defined above. • A spectrum of types of interstate society arranged along a spectrum from pluralist to solidarist. For social structural analysis, this spectrum replaces the traditional English school framing of Hobbesian, Grotian and Kantian: (a) Power Political represents here much the same as Hobbesian does for Wendt (1999) and the traditional English school’s




Barry Buzan

‘international system’ pillar, namely an international society based largely on enmity and the possibility of war, but where there is also some diplomacy, alliance making and trade. Survival is the main motive for the states, and no values are necessarily shared. Institutions will be minimal, mostly confined to rules of war, recognition and diplomacy. (b) Coexistence occupies some of the zone taken by Wendt’s (1999: 279–97) uncomfortably broad Lockean category, focusing on the exemplar of modern Europe, and meaning by it the kind of Westphalian system in which the core institutions of interstate society are the balance of power, sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy, great power management, war and international law. In the English school literature this form is labelled pluralist and incorporates the realist side of Grotianism. (c) Cooperative requires developments that go significantly beyond coexistence, but short of extensive domestic convergence. It incorporates the more solidarist side of what the English school calls Grotian, but might come in many guises, depending on what type of values are shared and how/why they are shared. Probably war gets downgraded as an institution, and other institutions might arise to reflect the solidarist joint project(s). (d) Convergence means the development of a substantial enough range of shared values within a set of states to make them adopt similar political, legal and economic forms. The range of shared values has to be wide enough and substantial enough to generate similar forms of government (liberal democracies, Islamic theocracies, communist totalitarianisms) and legal systems based on similar values in respect of such basic issues as property rights, human rights, and the relationship between government and citizens. One would expect quite radical changes in the pattern of institutions of international society. In a society of states the Kantian form of solidarism around liberal values identified by the English school and Wendt is one option, but not the only one. As argued above, contemporary global-level international society is found mainly in the interstate domain. In the interhuman domain, there is little of shared identity at the global level except the quite recent acceptance of human equality. There is a lot of activity in the transnational domain, but this hinges mainly on the liberal character of the leading powers. This global-level international society was created by the expansion of European international society, and is in many ways a product



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of the age of Western imperialism and the processes of decolonisation that brought it to an end. Today’s international society is the successor to an earlier colonial world order, and, as Keene (2002) points out, still contains many marks of its predecessor. One of the most obvious colonial legacies is the near universal acceptance of the sovereign territorial state as the fundamental unit of political legitimacy. So successful was the European state in unleashing human potential that it overwhelmed all other forms of political organisation in the system. To escape from European domination it was necessary to adopt European political forms. Some achieved this by copying, others had it imposed on them by the process of decolonisation (Bull and Watson, 1984: 434–5). Another obvious legacy is that the West still remains the dominant force within and behind this global international society. In one perspective, the West can be seen as one of the sub-global yolks on the egg-white of global interstate society, albeit a very large and very thick yolk. But in another perspective the West is still playing the vanguard role which it began with the process of colonisation and decolonisation. It is still the leading generator and exponent of new institutions for the global level, most obviously human rights, democracy and the market, which it seeks to export from its own sphere to the rest of interstate society. In its vanguard role the West is both another regional international society and the core of what is still a core–periphery power structure. Contemporary global interstate society is a mixture of the essentially Westphalian institutions exported by Europe and broadly accepted everywhere, with more liberal elements pushed by the West. Sovereignty, territoriality (meaning the principle that politics is to be organised on a territorial basis, as opposed to some other principle, for example medieval or nomadic, or religious or ethnic), diplomacy, international law, balance of power, war and great power management represent the Westphalian logic of a coexistence interstate society. Science, human rights and the market represent the logic of cooperation pushed by the liberal Western core. Because the Western liberal core is such a strong element in global interstate society, one would expect, and finds, a lot of interplay among the three domains (interstate, interhuman, transnational). With equality of people and the market as strong primary institutions, both individuals, and even more so TNAs of various kinds, are given substantial rights and standings within the secondary institutions of interstate society. Firms, political lobbying groups and interest groups are allowed, and often encouraged, to operate transnationally, and can acquire legal rights and responsibilities within the framework




Barry Buzan

of interstate society. TNAs and individuals are allowed to accumulate and use huge amounts of capital and organisational resources, and to play openly (and covertly) in the political processes of bilateral diplomacy, conferencing and multilateralism. Powerful TNAs and individuals have been important movers of interstate society on human rights, environment and some arms-control issues. Looking at the primary institutions of this global society, sovereignty and territoriality (and therefore the state) still feature strongly as master institutions. Of the derivatives from these, non-intervention is still quite robust, though no longer as absolute as it once was being under pressure from both human rights and US claims to a broad right of preventive action in pursuit of its national security (Bush, 2002). International law has become hugely elaborate, supporting many secondary institutions. Diplomacy remains a master institution with multilateralism the most significant derivative (though under threat from US unilateralism), and again a host of secondary institutions. Great power management remains robust as a general principle, but under stress from differences between unipolar and multipolar interpretations. Of its derivatives, alliances are no longer the most salient feature of the political landscape, and war is much hedged about with restrictions and largely ruled out among the major powers. Balance of power is somewhat harder to characterise. Certainly it does not operate in the same vigorous way that characterised it up to the end of the Cold War. The increasing adoption of liberal economic values has severely moderated anti-hegemonism, as exemplified inter alia by a quite widespread willingness among the powers to collaborate in big science projects. Nationalism, and its derivatives selfdetermination and popular sovereignty, remain strong, but democracy is not a globally shared value. Equality of people is strong as a master institution, but despite significant advances, its derivatives human rights and humanitarian intervention remain contested. It is still controversial whether to count them as global-level institutions or not. The market has finally triumphed as a master institution, strongly tied into multilateralism, and with trade and financial liberalisation as its major derivatives. Environmental stewardship probably now registers as a master institution, but more with a logic of coexistence than with the force of a joint project. In overview, a snapshot of the institutions of contemporary interstate society looks roughly as in Table 2.1. In sum, what one finds at the global level is a modestly cooperative interstate society whose coexistence elements are quite deep-rooted and stable, but whose cooperative ones as yet have shallower roots, and could more easily (which is not to say easily) be swept away by changes in



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The Middle East through English School Theory Contemporary international institutions (primary and secondary). Primary institutions Master

Derivative

Sovereignty

Non-intervention International law Boundaries Bilateralism Multilateralism

Territoriality Diplomacy

Great power management Equality of people Market

Nationalism

Environmental stewardship

Alliances War Balance of power Human rights Humanitarian intervention Trade liberalisation Financial liberalisation Hegemonic stability Self-determination Popular sovereignty Democracy Species survival Climate stability

Secondary institutions (examples of) UN General Assembly Most regimes, ICJ, ICC Some PKOs Embassies United Nations Conferences Most IGOs, regimes NATO UN Security Council UNHCR

GATT/WTO, MFN agreements IBRD, IMF, BIS Some PKOs

CITES, UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol, IPCC, Montreal Protocol, etc.

the distribution of power that reduced Western influence. This argument can be extended to tackle at least some of the concerns raised in the previous section about multiculturalism weakening the cultural foundations of interstate society. Certainly there is less cultural cohesion underpinning contemporary global interstate society than there was behind the European colonial interstate society of the nineteenth century. But the European imperium left behind more than just a global acceptance of the sovereign state and pluralist interstate society. It also embedded nationalism, science, the idea of progress and more recently the market, as more or less universally accepted ideas about human social organisation. As evidenced by the experience of the Soviet Union and China, without adopting this wider set, almost no state can either compete effectively in power terms or establish a genuine legitimacy with its own population. An argument can be made that the interstate domain at the global level is increasingly supported by a global-scale ‘Westernistic’ civilisation, or ‘Mondo culture’, which influences not just state elites, but also TNAs and popular culture (Buzan and Segal, 1998). Up to a



Table 2.1

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century ago, relatively few people thought of themselves as members of the human race in any meaningful way. Empire was common, outright slavery only recently pushed to the margins, unequal treatment routine, and the idea of a common humanity very marginal except within some religious traditions. Few people knew much or cared much about what was happening on other parts of the planet. Now many more people do know at least something about what goes on elsewhere, and up to a point care about it, even if very unevenly and in ways heavily shaped by patterns of media attention. In the transnational domain and through the global marketplace, some basic elements of a global culture are evolving from the relatively trivial, such as food, fashion, music and sport, to more serious developments in the emergence of global grassroots politics on issues such as the environment, anti-globalisation and human rights. These things matter in that they contribute to the stability of a global interstate society by embedding its ideas and symbols not just in state elites, but in the minds of the peoples as well. The existence of this ‘Westernistic’ culture does not eliminate the problems of multiculturalism. But it does represent a substantial transformation in the cultural underpinnings of interstate society that should not be ignored.

4 Conclusion The question for this book is how does the Middle East relate to this global international society of which it is by definition a part? Chapter 1 has already opened up this question, and the chapters that follow will do so in more detail. This chapter has set out the analytical framework and argued that there are very good reasons for examining international social structures within regions such as the Middle East. Chapters 3 and 4 provide the historical background, looking mainly at the Ottoman Empire and the sorts of social structures that existed in the Middle East prior to the imposition of the present system of states. Observing this historical legacy will enable us to assess the point raised by Halliday in Chapter 1 about the balance of continuity and disjuncture in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Middle East. Chapters 5 and 6 look respectively at the primary and secondary institutions of the interstate society in the Middle East. These institutions are the benchmarks against which we assess the degree and character of differentiation between the regional interstate society of the Middle East and the global one. Chapters 7 and 8 turn to a more ‘world’ society perspective, looking respectively at pan-Arabism and pan-Islam as distinctive features of Middle Eastern international society. Chapter 9 begins the return to a



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holistic view of the Middle East, developing a neo-Gramscian twist on the English school’s understanding of order and change. Chapter 10 sums up the insights from the case-study for both English school theory and Middle East studies, and gives an answer to whether or not there is a Middle Eastern international society, and if so what defines it, and how it relates to global international society. As hinted above, this whole exercise in some ways moves English school theory into terra incognita. This raises some analytical problems in that there are few or no precedents to guide the investigation on some essential aspects of this project. All of the authors in this volume have therefore to some extent to carve out pathways for the first time, and we will return to reflect on what we have learned from this in Chapter 10. The main theoretical deficiencies, and the reasons for them, are as follows: • Because the English school has not really given any consideration to

the regional level, there are precedents neither for how to define what would constitute a regional international society nor for how to relate it to, and differentiate it from, international society at the global level. • Although the distinctiveness of English school theory rests on primary institutions, this idea has been mainly developed historically and remains under-theorised. Two problems arise. First, because the English school has concentrated almost entirely on primary institutions in the interstate domain, there is a serious shortage of guidance on what primary institutions look like in the non-state domains and how these might relate to those in the interstate domain. Consequently there is almost no thinking about whether and how primary institutions might cut across domains. Nationalism and religion, for example, can easily be found in all three domains. • Second, although there are quite well-developed empirical and normative literatures on primary institutions, there is nothing that specifies in any precise way what the criteria are for inclusion into and exclusion from this category. Since we need to look for institutions that are distinctive to regional international societies, as well as those already present at the global level, this lack of specificity matters, and raises some interesting questions. • English school theory does not say much about how secondary institutions fit into international society. From Bull’s (1977: 40, 74) dismissal of the UN and secondary institutions in general as not being what the English school was about, the distinction, and academic division of labour, between primary and secondary institutional study has




Barry Buzan

been clear. But this division of labour has gone too far, with neither English school writers nor liberal institutionalists and regime theorists bothering to think about how the level of institutions that they study relates to the other. Secondary institutions do not define international societies, but they do matter, not least as expressions of, and possibly benchmarks for, primary institutions. The importance of secondary institutions to the regional level is most obviously developed in EU studies, but is present also in other regions: the Arab League, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and suchlike. We hope that our study will not only put these questions back onto the English school agenda, but also provide at least the beginnings of some answers to them. Readers might want to keep these issues in mind as they work through the chapters.



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The Ottoman Empire and its Precedents from the Perspective of English School Theory Amira K. Bennison

Introduction The Ottoman Empire was the major political configuration in the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century until its demise after the First World War. Only Morocco, Iran and parts of the Arabian peninsula remained outside its boundaries. It was thus not merely a Middle Eastern entity but a major power player within Europe and the Mediterranean whether officially recognised as such or not in the popular Westphalian model. However, to be ‘in’ Europe was not necessarily to be ‘of’ Europe and, as an Islamic empire, the Ottoman state’s identity was rooted within a matrix of concepts including that of universal Muslim society (the umma), unified Muslim religio-political authority in the form of the caliphate, and the primordial global distinction between the lands of Islam (dar al-islam) and the lands of war or unbelief (dar al-harb, dar al-kufr). It was also influenced by Turco-Mongol attitudes to politics and society including Ghuzz and Chinghiz Khanid universalism. Nonetheless, the application and understanding of these concepts varied greatly and Ottoman political praxis recognised a multiplicity of independent political entities, Muslim and non-Muslim, which engaged in war, made treaties of various kinds and allowed cross-border trade. Arguably, the Empire, its dependencies and neighbouring Muslim states formed a sub-global interstate society within a larger interstate system that included European as well as Muslim states in which the Ottoman Empire was a central pivot. Alongside this, the Ottoman era witnessed the continuation of an interhuman and transstate Muslim society which was constrained by the emergence of the Shi‘i Safavid state in Iran but not destroyed and which fits to some extent the English school concept of world society if one accepts 45



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the limitations presented by the absence of modern forms of media and communications. This chapter will begin with a brief analysis of the classical Islamic and Turco-Mongol political theories which informed the development of an Ottoman-centred political system in the sixteenth century. It will then consider whether one can apply the core notions of English school theory, developed to describe the European state system, to the Ottoman Empire prior to the nineteenth century given its Islamic and Turkic roots and thus distinct non-European trajectory of early development. If we take these core notions to be (i) an international or world system, (ii) international society and (iii) world society, the first issue that arises is whether one can consider the Ottoman world and adjacent territories as participants within such a system and society at the sub-global level. The obvious comparison is with the nascent European Westphalian state system of the same time. Although the Ottoman Middle East may have been configured differently, the architecture of a state system linking units within (autonomous provinces) and without (independent Muslim territories) most certainly existed, and frequently included European states, usually by means of commercial treaties, suggesting not only a sub-global system but also a different centre–periphery model to the Eurocentric one in the period prior to the nineteenth century. Since the next chapter deals with the European dimensions of this question, I shall concentrate here on the possible evolution of a Muslim sub-global international system and society within which the central Ottoman Empire functioned as a great power, balanced to some extent by Safavid and then Qajar Iran, and surrounded by a penumbra of smaller political units which were either autonomous Ottoman provinces, Ottoman clients or simply smaller neighbours such as ‘Alawi Morocco. This is a relatively understudied area in comparison to the plethora of recent studies on Ottoman relations with various European powers, and this chapter therefore presents some preliminary thoughts rather than firm conclusions. One caveat is in order and it is that this analysis depends on a fairly flexible interpretation of important English school institutions such as the balance of power, diplomacy, international law and war. If the way these institutions operated in prenineteenth-century Europe is seen as normative, then non-European modes of interaction inevitably seem different and even anomalous; it is therefore important to assess them using measures appropriate to the regional cultural nexus of which they were part. On the other hand, the presence of similarities may diminish the viability of considering these areas as structurally separate despite the different cultural and religious



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profiles of Europe and the Middle East. For the purposes of this analysis, North Africa should be included alongside the Middle East as an integral part of the Ottoman world, just as it later became one of the wings which would allow the Arab nation to fly – in the words of ‘Azzam Pasha, the first secretary-general of the Arab League in the late 1940s (al-Fasi, 1948: 467). This chapter will also explore the possibility of understanding the functioning of society below the level of the politico-religious elite as a sub-global world society. A vibrant and dynamic transstate Muslim society functioned within the Empire and much further afield, a society which claimed ideal universality but also recognised its limits in the form of the dar al-harb, the non-Muslim world, and in sectarian divisions within Islam. In the nineteenth century, this society was invested with new political significance and its vitality had to be recognised by all nation-state builders in the Middle East: it was temporarily squeezed rather uncomfortably into Arab nationalism but has since burst forth in a new and often radical form, topics which will be addressed later in the book. Here, I shall simply explore the degree to which the Muslim umma of the Ottoman era actually existed as a form of world society, the presence or absence of a public sphere, mobilisation, shared concerns predicated on Islam, and finally their impact on pre-colonial states within the Middle East and North Africa.

1 State, society and the international order in classical Islamic political discourse Islam’s developmental trajectory was such that it was a religion of empire from the outset and thus politically engaged from its inception. Early Muslims did not seek to convert the world but to subdue it to the dominion of Islam, and many Arab Muslims initially perceived Islam as the religion of the conquerors not their conquered subjects who were free for the most part to practise their own religions as long as they obeyed their Muslim overlords. Islam did, however, possess a strong universalist strand which ultimately triumphed over Arab particularism to create a new international Muslim community, the umma, which transcended ethnic and tribal identities, although it frequently became divided along sectarian lines. For a short period, Islamic government meant a single state presided over by the caliph, a figure variously understood to be the successor or deputy (khalifa) of the Prophet Muhammad or God. Initially caliphs were chosen, but the position became dynastic under the Umayyads and then ‘Abbasids, a development which speedily took the



The Ottoman Empire and English School Theory

Amira K. Bennison

institution towards divinely ordained kingship and competition between different lineages for the right to rule. At the same time the vast size of the Empire militated against its maintenance as a single political unit in any but the most theoretical sense. Muslim thinkers responded to this situation by accepting that there was a distinction between political reality and rather more idealised notions of universal religio-political rule expressed in discussion of the institution of the imamate or caliphate (Crone, 2004: 146). From at least the tenth century CE the emergence of rival caliphs and the control of the ‘Abbasid caliph by warrior lineages presented Muslim theorists with a reality which necessitated new theoretical justifications for political solutions of an inherently pluralist rather than universalist nature, and laid the foundations for a Muslim state system rather than a universal empire. As a result, while the caliphate and the universal Muslim community (umma) remained important symbols, important jurists such as al-Ghazali accepted the idea of a separation between religion and politics and a multiplicity of rulers within the Muslim sphere (Crone, 2004: 248). This development was confirmed by the murder of the last universally recognised ‘Abbasid caliph by the Mongols in Baghdad in 1258, an event which elicited little grief in Muslim sources, as Crone wryly observes (Crone, 2004: 250). The relationship between religion and government was thus broadly analogous to that pertaining in Christendom, but the connection between religion and society differed. Crone suggests that if one sees religion, state and society as three circles, only one was visible at the start of Islamic history. Over time, the state circle became almost completely detached from the other two which remained mapped onto each other; in other words, society continued to be regulated by the Shari‘a, and a ‘church’ separate to society did not emerge as it did in Christian societies (Crone, 2004: 396). This was to prove crucial to the maintenance of a regional interhuman society often represented by religious leaders which was not defined or delimited by political boundaries within the Islamic world, by the strictures of state churches, or by an overarching clerical authority such as the papacy or patriarchates. In the centuries preceding the rise of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims had thus come to accept the normative status of sultans, a word literally meaning ‘power’, and cognate types of ruler (amirs, khans), temporal rulers who held sovereignty over relatively well-defined territories within the Islamic domain which had the potential to function as a sub-global international system and perhaps society. Despite contemporary Islamist assertions about the sovereignty of God versus that of man, medieval Muslims understood the concept rather differently and assumed that



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God’s sovereignty was manifested in and represented by men, creating rather less of an issue. Among Sunni Muslims there was a consensus that even unjust rulers whose only claim to authority was their coercive power were to be considered legitimate unless God brought them down. According to medieval Hanafi jurists ‘the ruler is a person who effectively seizes and holds power’: meanwhile the ‘ulama acted as guardians of God’s law which was ‘the law of a community and not of a state’ (Imber, 1997: 65–6). This is an important point because it entailed the de facto acceptance of at least two different types of law: customary or state law and religious law. Certainly, sultans were technically obliged to uphold the Shari‘a but they could also adopt other precedents in such areas as the administration of trade, their relations with other rulers and states, and the practice of war. With respect to dealings with non-Muslim powers, medieval Muslims understood international relations as predicated on a core–periphery model, expressed through the dar al-islam/dar al-harb binary. On the one hand the dar al-islam represented territories which had submitted to the dominion of Islam either religiously or politically and were thus the core of a potentially universal system. On the periphery stood the dar al-harb, the domain of war, a category frequently misunderstood and interpreted as non-Muslim territories perpetually engaged in hostilities with Muslims. However, the concept of war has to be understood in the sense of non-submission to God, that is war against God rather than just Muslims. Several medieval Muslim philosophers in fact asserted that the difference between political systems based on revelation or human reason was not necessarily evident in this world, where they might be equally good, but in the next world, for which systems based on reason made no provision. Certainly, many early Muslims flushed with the success of the early conquests did see the Islamic political domain as ever-expanding due to war but, once the frontiers of the dar al-islam had stabilised, this position became increasingly rhetorical and practice became less belligerent. Over time, it became perfectly normal for Muslim states to entertain relations with non-Muslim states, even if it was theoretically hoped that they would at some point enter the dar al-islam. The relationship between the zones of Islam and war was mediated by the juridical development of a third zone, the dar al-‘ahd or dar al-sulh, the domain of agreement or truce. The ability to make agreements between Muslim and non-Muslim powers in itself points to a certain political openness as did the frequent extension of such ‘temporary’ arrangements, despite the disapproval of some jurists. This was an international vision which encompassed the




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globe and gave Islamic lands a central and superior position but nonetheless acknowledged the existence of non-Muslim polities as well as rival Muslim states. An additional and important strand in the political discourse of the era between the fall of the ‘Abbasids and rise of the Ottomans was the introduction of a new Turco-Mongol vision of universal empire from the Asian steppelands, a nomadic secular concept of world empire which contrasted with the sedentary religious model already in place in the Middle East. Both the Turks and Mongols conceived of a society divided between a politico-military elite and a subject population of tax payers, and maintained rational as opposed to revealed law codes, the Mongol yasa, the Turkic töre and ultimately the Ottoman kanun, which integrated custom with the proclamations of the supreme chief (Fleischer, 1986: 273–4). As Fleischer notes, the period from the establishment of the Mongol Empire until the rise of the Ottomans was one in which steppe and Islamic traditions jostled together to produce a new political synthesis (Fleischer, 1986: 274–5). The introduction of Turco-Mongol political discourse had a mixed effect upon existing Muslim attitudes to international relations. As in pre-Islamic Arabian society, war/conflict within the Turkic tradition was a normal state of affairs not an aberration as in Europe, and steppe raiding fitted easily into the jihad/ghaza framework fostering a distinct regional understanding of war as an ongoing process rather than a series of identifiable battles (Guilmartin, 1988). That being said, the bipolarity of the dar al-islam/dar al-harb model was mitigated by the Turco-Mongol division of the world’s population into nomad aristocrats, who formed a tax-exempt military elite, and tax-paying civilian subjects rather than religious communities. Moreover the Mongol conquest of the Middle East ruptured the previous rough correlation between Islam’s political and social boundaries by dividing the old Islamic heartland between states within the Mongol sphere and those outside it. This created at least two sub-global systems of states neither of whose membership was determined by religion. To the east, Mesopotamia and Iran, ruled by the Mongol Ilkhanids, became connected to the system represented by the Pax Mongolica which stretched from Iraq to China. In 1295 Ghazan Khan converted to Islam and the Ilkhanid elite began to follow suit but they continued to maintain relations with other non-Muslim khanates. The Mamluks of Egypt, themselves of Turkic and later Circassian origin, also participated in this system in order to secure Golden Horde support against the Ilkhanids and access to the slave markets of the steppe. In the western Mediterranean another sub-global state system



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emerged which incorporated the Iberian Christian kingdoms of Portugal, Castile and Aragon alongside the Muslim sultanates of Granada, Fes, Tlemsen and Tunis. Due to a considerable legacy of shared interaction, these kingdoms and sultanates participated in diplomatic, military and mercantile relations greatly facilitated by the ubiquitous presence of Jewish and Catalan merchants and mercenaries of diverse Christian and Muslim origins throughout the region. The impact of these political shifts and changing state structures upon the umma is not entirely clear or easy to assess. As Pearson points out, government in Muslim lands was minimalist throughout the pre-modern period and few people had direct contact with state authorities except in extraordinary circumstances. He asserts that for most of the population ‘membership in a state came last, and was not of particular interest’ in comparison to their membership of local communities, religious organisations, artisanal associations and so on and contrasts this to ‘the nation-state’s voracious appetite for loyalty’ (Pearson, 1982: 55). Perhaps the most significant aspect of the period was the entrenchment of the earlier shifting of responsibility for the guardianship of religion from the state to the community in a world of rulers who were either non-Muslim, like the Mongols, or military men with little knowledge of religion, like the Mamluks in Egypt. This was also the case in North Africa where dynasties of tribal origin and, at least initially, minimal education such as the Zanata Berber Marinids of Fes were heavily dependent on urban scholars. The small margin of overlap which existed between the circle of state and the two circles of society and religion lay in such rulers’ willingness to support the latter by the sword. This was generally the case, even in the Ilkhanid state after the Mongols began to convert to Islam in the late thirteenth century, and ensured a modicum of intra-Islamic security which allowed Muslims to maintain the networks painstakingly constructed in previous centuries. For scholars and those experienced in government it remained normal to undertake talab al-‘ilm, travel to acquire knowledge, and seek employment at different courts. Sufi mystics and pilgrims were similarly mobile: the annual hajj and ‘umra to Mecca annually drew large numbers of people along well-defined routes from Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and India while Sufis sought out the shrines of holy men. While literature on the many sects and creeds within Islam shows a distinct ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude within the dar al-islam rather than a single unitary umma, sects, law schools, Sufi brotherhoods and the state still provided facilities – mosques, Sufi lodges and caravanserais – which enabled Muslims to travel widely and remain within a familiar




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environment. As the late fourteenth-century travels of Ibn Battuta from Morocco to China and East Africa, whether fact or fiction, show, educated Muslims of this era could travel and work across a substantial part of the globe due to the institutional similarities between Muslim states, the linguistic hegemony of Arabic, and the prevalence of shared patterns of educational and juridical practice. Conversely, the circulation of personnel was an important factor in maintaining normative political and diplomatic practices between Muslim states. One feature of the period before the rise of the Ottoman Empire which prefigured the modern era was the fact that the dar al-islam and umma temporarily ceased to be coterminous. The Mongol conquest made this point most dramatically albeit briefly given the conversion of the majority of Mongols within the dar al-islam to the faith of their subjects within half a century. However, in the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal, Castile and Aragon, and in West Africa, East Africa and other peripheral areas, Muslim communities lived within larger non-Muslim societies and sometimes under non-Muslim rule. It is perhaps not surprising that in today’s transnational society where many Muslims live as minorities in nonMuslim countries, Islamists should refer so frequently to Ibn Taymiyya, a scholar who lived during the period of the Mongol conquests. Whether a Muslim could live outside the dar al-islam and fulfil the requirements of the faith was a hotly debated issue then as now. Ibn Taymiyya himself was ambivalent about when migration from infidel to Islamic territory was necessary but the debate underscored that Muslim society possessed a strong sense of connectivity and shared values not always replicated at the state level. The sixteenth century witnessed the end of this era and the crystallisation of new proto-national or imperial identities with a strong religious component in Iberia, North Africa and the Middle East. Although the Mudéjars of Castile and Aragon had believed they could practise their faith under Christian rule, their position became untenable after the fall of Granada in 1492 as Spanish and Catholic identities merged. During the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Muslims were forcibly converted to Catholicism and in 1609 those who could still be identified as converts from Islam were ordered to leave Spain to facilitate its emergence as a proto-national Christian monarchy within the European state system. At the same time, a new political regime emerged in the Muslim Middle East, that of the Ottoman Empire, which developed from humble beginnings as a Turco-Muslim warrior principality on the frontier with Byzantium into a vast Eurasian and North African empire which not only functioned as a great power within the European state system but also



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acted as the hub of a separate but overlapping coterie of new Muslim states for whose subjects its Islamic identity was paramount.

The establishment of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries created a political situation paralleled by the consolidation of Iran under the Safavids and the creation of the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent. Fleischer adds the Uzbek khanate to this list of major Muslim powers (Fleischer, 1986: 275) and one might also add ‘Alawi Morocco at the opposite end of the region. An outer ring of smaller Muslim states of a similar size to the late medieval sultanates also existed in West Africa, Arabia, Central Asia, and South-East Asia. After a period of relatively high political fragmentation, the division of the Islamic world along a Mongol axis, and the participation of Muslim polities in Mongol and Mediterranean systems of states, a new state structure emerged in which several Muslim great powers usually termed ‘empires’ jostled alongside a number of smaller Muslim states. Marshall Hodgson characterised this era as the age of the ‘gunpowder empires’ (Hodgson, 1974) because he believed that the crucial difference between the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals and their predecessors was the introduction of musket infantry and artillery which enabled rulers to control much larger territories and tax the land more effectively than previously. Although Rhoads Murphey has questioned the degree to which firearms did replace cavalry archers (Murphey, 1999: 35–49), and Rohan d’Souza has suggested that equilibrium between aristocratic cavalrymen and their rulers rather than new arms-bearing corps lay at the heart of the emergence and stability of these empires (d’Souza, 2002), the financial and military efficacy of the new political order is evident. One characteristic of the Ottoman Empire was the tension between centralisation and provincial autonomy which has ramifications for any understanding of the international system(s) of which it was part. As Imber has noted, the recent trend to describe the Ottoman Empire as a ‘state’ begs the question of what kind of ‘state’ it could actually be said to be (Imber, 2002: xiv). In fact, ‘empire’ provides a good sense of the diversity of entities incorporated under the Ottoman umbrella and creates a parallel between the Habsburg Empire and its diverse constituent parts located among a cluster of other states of varying sizes. While the level of centralised rule in the Balkans, Anatolia and the Arab provinces varied according to numerous factors, they rarely achieved autonomy,



2 The Ottoman Empire and its political structure

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and personnel with some actual power were regularly appointed from Istanbul. However, in other areas such as North Africa, the Crimea and Arabia, hereditary dynasties or lineages merely requested the recognition of the Ottoman sultan at the accession of a new ruler. The Ottomans themselves, or at least their political advice authors, naturally promoted the concept of a centralised empire, and insisted upon its reality, but provincial separatism and even autonomy characterised relations between Istanbul and some of its provinces, most notably the North African regencies (eyalets) of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, popularly known in Europe as the Barbary states. After a revolt of the Janissaries in Tunis in 1591, the Porte granted Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli the status of ‘privileged provinces’ (eyalet mumtaze) which allowed them to maintain their own fleets, perform naval and military duties rather than remit annual revenues to Istanbul, and sign treaties on their own behalf following conditions laid down by the Ottoman sultan (Moalla, 2004: 13). Moalla further notes that a ‘principle of intangibility of frontiers’ existed between these provinces (Moalla, 2004: 18) rendering them similar to independent states. The subsequent development of hereditary governorships in Tripoli and Tunis further enhanced the political autonomy of the regencies but at the same time both parties maintained their obligation to provide assistance (i‘ana) in times of war; military, governmental and fiscal structures followed Ottoman patterns; and each ruler received marks of Ottoman investiture, handed over in solemn ceremonies, at their accession. Although the majority of colonial and nationalist historians have argued for the separate sovereignty of the regencies given their ability to make treaties independent of the sultan in Istanbul, Moalla insists that Ottoman investiture of new rulers in the regencies, reciprocal rights to assistance in times of military threat, and gift exchange place them firmly within the Empire (Moalla, 2004). The extent of Ottoman sovereignty in the Arabian peninsula and the Crimea was similarly vague despite the integrative and absolutist model proposed by Katib Çelebi and Na‘ima (Fleischer, 1984: 48). Mustafa Âli, for instance, considered both the Tartar khans of the Crimea and the sharifs of Mecca independent sovereigns, despite their vassal status (Fleischer, 1986: 277). For a time, the Empire also had Christian vassals such as Wallachia and Moldavia in the Balkans, and for a brief period in the sixteenth century the Ottomans participated in Moroccan succession disputes. The Ottoman system was thus in many ways a continuum stretching out from the fully integrated central provinces to autonomous provinces, client kingdoms or vassals, and Muslim and non-Muslim neighbours.



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Ottoman legitimacy drew on Turco-Mongol and Islamic precedents. Fleischer sees the Ottoman Empire as a ‘unique, if not aberrant, phenomenon’ in Islamic history due to its emphasis on natural justice and the central role of the Ottoman dynasty as rulers of a defined geographic sphere (Fleischer, 1986: 253). The sixteenth-century Ottoman theorists Ebu’s-Su’ud and Mustafa Âli upheld broadly similar theses for the legitimacy of the Ottomans which included the manipulation of their lineage to indicate their descent from Oghuz, the eponym of the Ghuzz Turks, their inheritance of Muslim lands from the Seljuk Turks and their dedication to justice, understood as a religious, universal concept (Imber, 1997: 73–4; Fleischer, 1986: 282, 287–8). Although the Ottomans adopted a more obviously Islamic profile after their conquest of the Arab lands, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, in the early sixteenth century, a distinction remained between religion and the state/dynasty (din-ü-devlet) which was also apparent in the Ottomans’ dual legal system based on the Shari‘a and ‘state’ kanun, despite the close partnership between the two. Secular attitudes derived from the Turco-Mongol heritage were also qualified by the tendency among Ottoman political theorists of discussing international relations using the medieval dar al-islam/dar al-harb formulation and its concomitant, jihad or ghaza. This reflected the origins of the Ottoman Empire as a Turkic warrior principality on the frontiers of Byzantium which led generations of Ottoman sultans to style themselves ‘holy warriors’ (ghazis) until the Empire’s demise in the 1920s. Their conquest of the Balkans and Aegean peninsula was legitimised in terms of jihad against the infidel, and their conquest of Constantinople was celebrated as the culmination of the Islamic conquests which had begun in the seventh century. In much advice literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the need to continue the jihad and expand the Ottoman Muslim domain in order to restore the inner vitality of the Empire is a recurrent trope alongside more practical suggestions for reform. However, Ottoman historians have debated the religious as opposed to political purpose of jihad ideology in the Ottoman state and have shown that from a very early stage, the Ottomans were pragmatists. Their crossing into Europe, for instance, was facilitated by a marriage alliance with the Byzantines and they made war against Muslim as well as Christian rivals in the region (see Imber, 2002). Their championing of the faith cannot therefore be seen as qualitatively different to Russian support for Orthodox Christianity or the Habsburgs’ leadership of the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, the Shi‘ism of Safavid Iran may have provided as




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3 The Ottomans and their Muslim neighbours An underlying question in this attempt to understand the Ottoman Empire from the perspective of English school theory is whether there is any compatibility between the European state system of the early modern age and the adjacent Ottoman-centred system either as two separate sub-global systems or as parts of an embryonic global state system of wider reach. Internal discourses of legitimation such as that elaborated by Mustafa Âli clearly positioned the Ottomans alongside other Muslim Turco-Mongol successor states and intimated that they formed what we may call a sub-global system in which borders were ‘with certain temporary exceptions, fixed and acknowledged’ (Fleischer, 1986: 275). Moreover, jihad was a constant referent whether purely rhetorical or not, thus creating at least a cultural line between the Muslim and Christian spheres. Nonetheless, the Empire’s geographical position crossed the faith boundary and the Ottomans perceived themselves as bringing together four major peoples: Turks, Greeks, Arabs and Persians. The rumi or European dimension of the Empire subsisted with the Arabo-Persian or Middle Eastern dimension, and relations with nearby Christian European states including Venice, Poland and Russia were integral to Ottoman political and commercial life. The Ottoman Empire was very much on the cusp of two worlds and even some of its most Islamic characteristics were designed to respond to European challenges as well as Muslim exigencies. The Ottoman claim to caliphate certainly had Islamic implications but it also Islamised the Ottoman bid for world hegemony. After the accession of Charles V, the Ottomans and Habsburgs both aspired to ‘resurrect the Roman Empire’ and claim the title of Caesar (Brummett, 1994: 5), and Suleyman’s use of the caliphal title expressed his rivalry with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and his brother, Ferdinand of Austria, King of the Romans, as well as with the Safavids and Mughals (Imber, 1997: 74). Viewing the caliphate in this light, as a way of asserting Ottoman status on the world stage, coincides with Veinstein’s argument that the frequently cited myth that the Ottomans inherited the caliphate from the last ‘Abbasid caliph in Cairo on their conquest of the city in 1517, only emerges with the



much of a justification for jihad as Christianity, as Venetian diplomatic reports constantly suggested in the sixteenth century (Brummett, 1994: 29–31). In most cases, jihad or ghaza discourse whether directed at Christian enemies or the Safavids provided a particular cultural packaging for war rather than actually causing it or dictating the nature of its course.

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signing of the humiliating Treaty of Kuçuk Kaynarja with Russia in 1774 (Veinstein, 2005). During this period it could be argued that the eventual globalisation of the European system was not a foregone conclusion and it would theoretically have been possible for the Ottoman-centred system to have become the global norm with Europe on the periphery. As Hodgson says of the Islamic world in this era, ‘It was the one society that had come closest to playing the world-dominating role which (as it turned out) the West was actually to play’ (Hodgson, 1974: 3). However, this assumes a divide between Christendom and Hodgson’s Islamicate civilisation, while the substance of Brummett’s argument in her study of Ottoman commerce and diplomacy in the first decades of the sixteenth century is precisely that one cannot posit such a Christian–Muslim or orient–occident divide in the political arena. She suggests instead that the Ottomans were part of the seaborne expansion which characterised the ‘Age of Discovery’ and that, in contrast to received wisdom, the Empire was ‘a merchant state endowed with economic intentionality’ and ‘cannot be assessed as a separate isolationist block set apart by Islamic philosophy or a slave state military ethos’ (Brummett, 1994: 4–5). While integrating the Ottoman Empire into the history of Europe is the favoured stance of Ottoman historians at present, it is also worthwhile to explore the Ottoman position within the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Hodgson suggested that the rise of these empires was ‘a major blow’ to ‘the cosmopolitan comprehensiveness of Islam’ and that the adoption of Imami Shi‘ism by the Safavids created a religiocultural barrier between Iran and its Ottoman and Mughal neighbours which undermined the previous unity of the umma (Hodgson, 1974: 4, 33). Scholars from Vámbéry in the mid-nineteenth century onwards assumed a similar barrier between Iran and Sunni Central Asia which has only recently been questioned (McChesney, 1996: 231–3). Against the notion of religious schism, however, Murphey describes the relationship between the Safavids and Ottomans as driven by ‘a spirit of compromise and mutual recognition’ (Murphey, 1999: 5). Ideological concerns and polemic aside, the reality of commercial and diplomatic relations between the parties and the existence of negotiated treaties, common norms of war and embassies suggest that this barrier was very porous and does not prevent us considered the Ottomans, Safavids and Uzbeks as participants in the same sub-global international system, even if the level of participation across the Sunni–Shi‘i divide fluctuated between coexistence and cooperation, and sporadically descended into war.




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In favour of an argument for a Muslim international system connected to but distinct from the European system of the same era one could adduce the fact that most regional regimes shared in the Turco-Mongol and Islamic heritage and were ruled by dynasties of Turco-Mongol origin. Even the Safavids who claimed descent from the Prophet were also descended from the Aq Qoyunlu Turcomen. Although caliphal – and thus universalist – rhetoric surfaced at times, particularly during the reigns of Suleyman the Magnificent and Abdülhamid II (Imber, 1997: 74–6, 103–6; Deringil, 1998), all the major regimes were Islamic dynastic monarchies which jostled for precedence rather than denying each other the right to exist. Speaking of the period before Suleyman, Imber states, ‘Caliph became, above all, a title which Muslim sovereigns adopted for rhetorical effect without making any specific claim to divine right or to supreme sovereignty over the entire Muslim community’ and although he presents a convincing argument for the greater import of the title to Suleyman and his chief jurist, Ebu’s-Su’ud, Fleischer remarks in his analysis of the writings of the post-Suleymanic author Mustafa Âli, ‘the notion of a multiplicity of regional sovereigns is accepted’ (Imber, 1997: 103; Fleischer, 1986: 279). The same could be said for the relations between the Ottoman Empire and sharifian Morocco whose sultans also claimed caliphal status. During the sixteenth century, Ottoman sovereignty was implanted across North Africa and the Ottomans tried to turn Morocco into a client kingdom ruled by ‘Abd al-Malik, a prince of the local Sa‘di sultanate who had been educated in Istanbul. Portugal competed to place their own Sa‘di protégé, Muhammad, on the throne. The upshot was the disastrous Battle of the Three Kings in 1578 in which ‘Abd al-Malik, Muhammad and Sebastian of Portugal all died. The Sa‘di sultanate was inherited by Ahmad al-Mansur who took the wise step of presenting Morocco as a convenient buffer between Habsburg and Ottoman territories, a status which it retained with the subsequent ‘Alawi sultans who came to power in 1669 despite their domestic use of the caliphal title, amir al-mu’minin. Although Turkic influence was minimal in Morocco, the state’s profile was similar to that in other parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Isma‘il, the second ‘Alawi sultan recruited a black slave army modelled on the Janissaries which counterbalanced Arab and Berber tribal cavalry who together formed a privileged tax-exempt elite. The importance of the Ottomans beyond their own frontiers reflected the great size of their Empire and its unique Eurasian–African reach. In the period under review the Ottoman caliphate was yet to develop the resonance which it had for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent in



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the era of pan-Islamism due to the existence of the Mughal Empire, but it had no other Muslim rivals. Moreover, the Ottomans control of the Arab lands, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, gave them an international role as ‘protectors of the Holy Places’, which meant in effect protectors of the annual caravans of pilgrims who came from all parts of the Islamic world to perform the hajj. The Ottomans invested a great deal on defending hajj caravans in their territories, providing water and lodging for pilgrims, and maintaining and improving the urban infrastructure in Mecca and Medina (Faroqhi, 1994). Prior to the rise of Arab nationalism, many Muslims conflated this stewardship with the Ottomans’ possession of the caliphate without feeling that their Turkish ancestry disqualified them from it. For example, Ahmad al-Bakkay, a nineteenth-century shaykh of the Qadiriyya in Timbuctu, asserted that there were only two imams (that is caliphs), the Moroccan sultan as a result of his sacred lineage and the Ottoman sultan as a result of his power (Zebadia, 1974: 196). However, the distance of the Ottoman Empire from West Africa precluded such constructs from having much political weight and the integration of sub-Saharan African Muslim states into a subglobal system was minimal despite the Moroccans’ attempts to conquer Songhai in the late sixteenth century. The Sahara thus placed one identifiable limit upon the Ottomaninfluenced Muslim state network while the Mughal Empire formed another. Iran and the Uzbek khanates of Central Asia may be considered participants in both Ottoman and Mughal networks but Safavid Iran, in particular, had closer relations with the Ottomans due to their long shared borders and initial competition to rule eastern Anatolia which was resolved in the Ottomans’ favour at the Battle of Çaldiran in 1514. Although relations between the Ottoman Empire, its dependencies, Morocco and Iran were not always cordial, it is possible to identify some distinctive and shared aspects to their understanding of the institutions of sovereignty, international law, diplomacy and war. With respect to sovereignty, the majority of Muslim states in the Ottoman sphere and beyond were dynastic monarchies whose genealogy could be traced to either legendary Turco-Mongol leaders or the Prophet. There was also a proclivity towards dynasticism in the outlying provinces of the Empire as the example of the Husaynids in Tunis and the Karamanli in Tripoli indicates. The legitimacy of ruling lineages tended to be proved by military means, conceptualised as jihad or ghaza, and ratified by the bay‘a, an oath of allegiance offered to a new ruler by the politico-military elite and representatives of the subject population. While each ruler controlled a roughly defined territorial area, no internal




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Muslim boundary was completely fixed but consisted instead of a march area in which the inhabitants shifted their allegiances as circumstances demanded. It was only in the nineteenth century that boundaries such as that between Iran and the Ottoman Empire or the Regency of Algiers and Morocco gained concrete delineation ratified by border treaties. This characteristic of sovereignty reflected two normative institutions – religion and tribalism. The role of Islam is well expressed by the nineteenth-century Moroccan historian Ahmad al-Nasiri in his account of the reign of the eighteenth-century ‘Alawi sultan Muhammad, mentioned above. Al-Nasiri describes the Mediterranean as inhabited by many ‘peoples’ (ajnas), some Christian and some Muslim, but also suggests a special affinity and solidarity between Muslim states: The Frankish kings and despots respected him [Sidi Muhammad] and their representatives came to him with gifts and precious things, asking for his protection at sea. He achieved this [status] by his wise policies and skilfulness until his protection was extended to all Christian peoples except the Muscovites, with whom he would not make a treaty because of Russian warfare against the Ottoman sultan. (al-Nasiri, 1956: 70) Moreover, the possibility of Muslims shifting their allegiance from one Muslim ruler to another was considered much less serious than the loss of the territories of the dar al-islam to an ‘infidel’ power. In fact, the prevalence of tribalism in many areas such as North Africa, the Syrian desert, Iraq, Iran and eastern Anatolia made such shifts frequent as tribes migrated and used their movements to evade taxation. That being said, the principles of non-intervention and respect of sovereignty could not be completely ignored, especially in the case of towns which were commercial and administrative nodes. When the inhabitants of the western Algerian city of Tlemsen appealed to the Moroccan sultan to accept their transfer of allegiance from the Ottomans in 1830 they presented a long legal justification for their appeal which included arguments based on the illegitimacy of the Ottoman representatives in Algiers and the inability of the Sublime Porte to protect them from the French who had just invaded Algiers. Although the sultan accepted their plea, many Moroccan religious scholars considered such a disavowal of Ottoman sovereignty quite unacceptable (Bennison, 2002: 49–51). A shared faith also played some role in the management of war and peace between these states. Although sixteenth-century Venetians



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believed that the rupture between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims was insurmountable and portrayed Shi‘ism as akin to Christianity, this was largely wishful thinking on their part encouraged by the Safavids’ keenness for a strategic alliance against the Ottomans. In his assessment of Ottoman–Safavid war, Rhoads Murphey contrasts the expansive wars of the Ottoman Empire in Europe with their more limited objectives in the East, saying, ‘the use of military force against Muslim co-religionists to resolve specific disputes or to enforce treaty terms might be justified but wars of conquest were another matter’. He later asserts that the Ottomans ‘studiously avoided wars of religion’ (Murphey, 1999: 5, 173) positing a shared Muslim identity rather than conflictual Sunni–Shi‘i identities, despite both sides’ use of religious rhetoric to the contrary in the early stages of the conflict. In the case of the frontier zone with Iran, the Ottomans often mustered large armies to demonstrate their fighting capabilities with the objective of securing favourable terms in a treaty rather than engaging in conflict. The endemic raiding and warfare which did take place up until the midseventeenth century tended to push the frontier backwards and forwards rather than achieve radical changes. Sectarianism did not prevent the Ottomans and Safavids signing the Treaty of Amasya, which defined their respective boundaries in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iraq, in 1555, the first such treaty between the two powers. Although both parties alternately invaded past the limits set by Amasya, the Treaty of Istanbul in 1590 and treaty renewals in 1612 and 1619 repeatedly re-established them. After the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639 which confirmed the return of Baghdad to the Ottomans after 15 years of Safavid occupation, there were no further major wars between the two parties and the border between Iran and Iraq has remained fairly constant since. War-making on the western front in North Africa had similarly limited objectives after Ottoman corsairs had expelled the Spanish from the majority of their coastal enclaves and secured Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli for the Ottoman Empire. The border area with the Moroccan sultanate was agreed to lie somewhere between the Muluwya and Tafna rivers with the Moroccans and the Ottomans of Algiers each upholding the frontier most advantageous to themselves but tacitly recognising that this created a no-man’s-land between the two rivers through which several tribes moved as they pleased. Prior to the French conquest of western Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, there were no major conflicts along this frontier after 1701 when the ‘Alawi sultan of Morocco, Isma‘il, attempted to march on Algiers triggering a response from the Ottomans who advanced into the sultanate towards its northern capital Fes but then




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withdrew once an acceptable frontier zone had been established. Despite casting covetous eyes east, no other Moroccan sultan transgressed this arrangement until ‘Abd al-Rahman accepted the allegiance of Tlemsen in 1830 in the context of the French conquest of Algiers and the potential substitution of non-Muslim for Muslim rule in the province. In the realm of diplomacy, there are many more treaties and agreements extant between the Ottomans and European states than other Muslim states, and of the 34 Ottoman ambassadorial reports preserved from the eighteenth century only eight were not to Europe (Aksan, 1995: xvii). Extant reports from Iran and Morocco are similarly limited in number. Nonetheless, ambassadors and visitors did travel between Muslim countries in the Ottoman sphere on a more or less regular basis and the dearth of reports may indicate the greater sense of familiarity which accompanied such exchanges. A Safavid envoy travelled to the Ottoman court in 1508 while the two powers jostled in eastern Anatolia and Iraq and waited to fight over Mamluk domains in Syria and Egypt. Normal diplomacy was suspended between 1514 and 1517 while the Ottomans decisively defeated the Safavids, made the Turcomans of the border their vassals, and took Syria, western Arabia and Egypt from the Mamluks, and the Ottoman sultan Selim I had to be dissuaded from beating or executing several Safavid and Mamluk envoys (Brummett, 1994: 83, 85). However, after this period, the Ottomans’ supremacy in the Middle East was uncontested as it was in North Africa by 1574, and inter-Muslim diplomacy resumed a more normal course. The Cambridge History of Iran says very little about Safavid–Ottoman diplomatic relations beyond noting that there were numerous legations in the reign of ‘Abbas II after the two sides had signed the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639. There are also some references in the work of a Samarqand scholar and poet, Muhammad Badi‘, to an embassy from Uzbek Samarqand to Safavid Isfahan in 1679 which may have had the task of preparing for the pilgrimage of the khan of Bukhara which took place two years later and had to pass through Iran (McChesney, 1996: 239–40). Morocco interacted regularly with the North African regencies, especially neighbouring Algiers, and maintained direct relations with the Ottoman Porte in the eighteenth century. Sidi Muhammad sent three missions to Abdülhamid I’s court in Istanbul and the Ottomans sent at least one ambassador back in the 1780s. The objective of the Moroccan missions was to complain about the attitude of the Algerian regime towards him and secure freedom of action in North Africa, while the Ottomans, keen for allies against Russia, hoped for money and other material aid from Morocco (Benaboud, 1988).



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This is scant material for an analysis of inter-Muslim diplomacy but two accounts hint at the shared assumptions which guided such interactions and their absence in the Christian European domain. When Abu’l-Qasim al-Zayani travelled to Istanbul in 1784–5, he was greatly struck by the power and wealth of the Ottomans but had no difficulty communicating or adapting to diplomatic protocols which were more elaborate but basically similar to those in Morocco (Benaboud, 1988). In contrast, the Safavid ambassador who travelled to Prague, Rome and Valladolid in 1601 became increasingly incensed by his experiences which included the conversion of several members of his entourage to Christianity under pressure from his royal hosts (Jackson and Lockhart, 1986: 387). The argument for a distinct approach to international law rather than shared cultural expectations is weak. Although it is tempting to see the Shari‘a as a sub-global framework for international relations it would be an exaggeration to suggest that inter-Muslim relations were guided solely by Islamic law. Interstate relations were not the Shari‘a’s major concern due to its focus on individual worship (‘ibadat) and social relations (mu‘amalat). Although it offered some prescriptions about the conduct of war in the jihad sections of law books which distinguished between combatants and non-combatants, prescribed who could be made a prisoner of war and gave the correct allocations of booty, its position on treaties was limited to insisting that only temporary truces could be made with non-Muslims and only when they were absolutely necessary for Muslim welfare. War among Muslims was disapproved of, but legitimate in the case of rebels or heretics on condition that such opponents should be reintegrated into the Muslim community whenever possible. If different rules were actually applied to Muslim and non-Muslim relations at the state level, identifiable differences certainly diminished after the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 which placed Ottomans and Europeans on the same footing. In further opposition to the case for a sub-global system stands the reality of extensive diplomatic and military interactions between almost every Muslim political entity within the Ottoman sphere and European states centuries before the balance tilted decisively in favour of Europe in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman relationship with Venice, Poland, France, Russia and many other European states does not need elaboration here but other more peripheral connections occurred. As is well known among Moroccanists, the Sa‘di sultan Ahmad al-Mansur made several diplomatic overtures to Elizabeth I of England in the hope of forming an alliance against their mutual enemy, Spain. The ‘Alawi sultan




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Mawlay Isma‘il (r. 1672–1727), was interested in a marriage alliance with the French royal house and his grandson, Muhammad (r. 1757– 90), sent diplomatic missions to Spain, Malta and Naples as well as Istanbul. The North African regencies also entertained direct relations with European states and made war on them unmediated by Istanbul despite their formal membership of the Ottoman Empire. The Tunisian– Venetian conflict of 1782–92 being an example of the latter. Tunis and Algiers also refused to confirm peace with Russia in 1777 even though the 1774 Treaty of Kuçuk Kaynarja required them to do so (Moalla, 2004: 49). From its foundation, the Safavid state also sought out contact with European partners, especially Venice but also the Habsburgs and Hungarians, with a view to making an alliance against the Ottomans. Moreover, the arrival of the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf in 1507, their occupation of Hurmuz in 1515 and clashes with the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean placed Europeans on all sides of the Muslim Middle East. The East India Company started trading with Iran in 1616 and the Dutch Oost Indische Company followed suit soon afterwards. The Safavids and Ottomans both tried to use European states to balance power to their advantage: the Safavids approached the Habsburgs, Hungarians and British while France’s late arrival on the Iranian scene reflected its long-standing alliance with the Ottomans. The pressure of Russia to the north was another constant of international relations during this period which further diminishes our ability to view Muslim states as participants in a separate system: the peace negotiated between the Ottomans and Nadir Shah of Iran in 1736, for instance, was prompted by the outbreak of war with Russia and the Ottomans’ inability to fight on two fronts simultaneously. Therefore, at the state level neither the Muslim Middle East nor Christian Europe operated without reference to the other during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Just as the Ottoman Empire was ‘in’ Europe so European states were ‘in’ the Middle East and North Africa. There were cultural distinctions predicated upon religious or sectarian differences and different concepts of centrality but these do not seem to have seriously affected the handling of war, diplomacy or the balance of power, strengthening the case for a single international system. Nonetheless, Muslim states did express and demonstrate a certain community of interest and a perception of a common responsibility for maintaining the territorial integrity of the dar al-islam. Their frontiers were characterised by marches, and warfare rarely exceeded such frontier zones. The existence of these different cultural zones suggests that the characterisation of the international system as (Christian) European is highly problematic. From the Ottoman Muslim perspective, the Empire was



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4 The umma of the Ottoman era: a world society in the making? The pre-Ottoman umma described above was a powerful social ideal which gave Muslims a transstate perception of the world community to which they belonged even if the majority of them did not personally experience it and actually lived their lives in much more localised units such as the village, tribe or town. The information which we have from chronicles and biographical dictionaries suggests that for the ‘ulama who did have direct experience of the umma and left textual traces of their attitudes, ‘society’ was much smaller and much larger than state structures. The dynastic monarchical states which emerged in the sixteenth-century Middle East and North Africa superficially created a stronger connection between sectarian Muslim identity and the state: Twelver Shi‘ism gradually became the ‘state religion’ in Iran, the Ottoman Empire was Sunni Hanafi and Morocco developed its own blend of veneration for the descendants of the Prophet and adherence to Sunni Maliki law. However, the influence of the state on society and social attitudes remained patchy despite the former’s absolutist aspirations. In the case of the division between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, the linguistic frontier between Arabic- and Persian-speaking zones had as much impact as religious difference. Moreover, there is little indication that the inhabitants of the region began to see themselves as ‘Ottomans’, ‘Iranians’ or ‘Moroccans’ before the nineteenth century. Instead the state–society bifurcation of earlier times was institutionalised in the form of the division between the tax-exempt politicomilitary elite (askeri) and the tax-paying subject population (reaya). This division was, on the one hand, mitigated by the recruitment of some cavalry troops from the Muslim population but on the other heightened by the formation of crack arms-bearing infantry from enslaved or co-opted non-Muslim populations – the Ottoman Janissaries from the Christian Balkans up until the seventeenth century; the Safavid Qullar from among Circassians and Georgians of Christian or recent convert origin; the ‘Alawi ‘Abid al-Bukhari from sub-Saharan Africans. Particularly in the Ottoman case, stark differences could exist between rulers and



part of a central core of Muslim states surrounded by an outer ring of non-Muslim states which were essential players in the Middle Eastern balance of power, the obverse of the European view according to which the Ottomans, Safavids or Moroccans were bit players in the European balance of power.

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ruled in terms of language, religion, sect or law school and Ottomans prided themselves rather on their multiethnic, multireligious imperial profile which gained administrative reality in the famous millet system. In Iran, Turks, Tajiks (Persians) and Arabs rubbed shoulders and Sunni communities continued to live within a Twelver Shi‘i state which also faced ideological challenges from rural Sufi orders and radical Shi‘i sects. There was therefore no perfect match between the umma, or any subsection of it, and the state structures of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Even when something akin to a state religious establishment did begin to emerge it rarely had the same social reach as a state church in Christian Europe. The Ottomans did not try to create a state religion for their Empire until the days of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), prior to which the corps of Hanafi ‘ulama produced in the theological colleges (madrasas) of Istanbul served the elite rather than the population as a whole. Once Iran had actually become a majority Shi‘i country, a process that was not complete before the end of the Safavid era, the Shi‘i clerical establishment created by Safavid patronage had to contend with the popular leadership offered by the scholars of Najaf and Karbala in Ottoman Iraq. Meanwhile the Moroccan sultans attempted to follow the Ottoman lead and create a state corps of Maliki ‘ulama in the eighteenth century but failed to stop the majority of the population adhering to powerful rural religious brotherhoods which reached down into the Sahara and across into Ottoman Algiers. Muslim society thus continued to maintain its own separate identity beneath the state umbrella, subdivided not by political loyalties but by such transstate categories as sect, law school or religious brotherhood. The main institutions of that society were pilgrimage, education and trade, although the last naturally transcended religious as well as political frontiers. Printing came late to most Muslim societies and the Middle Eastern/Arab press only began to flourish in Cairo in the 1880s. In the period under review, therefore, cohesion within the umma continued to be generated by the personal connections made during travel for religious, educational and commercial purposes across internal Muslim frontiers. Although Ottoman control of the Hijaz privileged Sunni pilgrim traffic and made performance of the hajj difficult for Iranian Shi‘is, it should be noted that the Shi‘i pilgrimage network included the shrines of the imams in Mashhad, Najaf, Karbala and Samarra, the last three of which were usually in Ottoman territory. Two literary genres which evoke the world society of the umma are travel accounts (rihlat) often of the pilgrimage, which evoke the sacred transstate geography of Islam, and biographical dictionaries (tarajim) which give concrete information about the origins and movements of



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generations of scholars and their families. Volume one of al-Jabarti’s Tarikh ‘Aja’ib al-Athar fi’l-Tarajim wa’l-Akhbar, which contains historical and biographical information on Egypt for the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, lists 17 distinguished individuals from Ottoman North Africa and Morocco who followed itineraries in which Fes, Tunis, Cairo, the Hijaz and Anatolia figure largely. To that number of scholars and mystics who made their mark should be added the students and merchants who formed the Maghrebi community in Cairo and participated actively in the street politics of the period according to al-Jabarti. The significance of a common scholarly formation is well conveyed by Benaboud who says of two Moroccan ambassadors to Istanbul who travelled through Ottoman North Africa, Arabia and Syria: ‘al-Zayani and Ibn ‘Uthman give a positive projection of the ‘ulama, with whom they had no problem associating and with whom they were able to identify fully’ (Benaboud, 1988: 73). In addition to the information given by local dictionaries, the development of ‘universal’ dictionaries recording all the eminent scholars for a particular century, which were popular from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, indicates a sense of common Muslim community which transcended divisions between scholars, Sufis, and the jurists of different law schools, as well as assimilating them to a larger Ottoman society which also included officials, military commanders and the sultans. Although hardly as extensive as the term ‘universal’ asserts, dictionaries from the Ottoman Arab lands covered greater Syria, Arabia and Egypt and included entries for North Africans and Iranians who had come to the author’s attention. The formulaic character of many entries to these dictionaries conveys the values of the elite of the Ottomancentred umma – charity, piety, scholarship and spiritual charisma. Such values were upheld primarily by the ‘ulama but their membership of notable families with mercantile and administrative connections created a small group capable of forming the core of a civil society, a position they shared with the shaykhs of the Sufi brotherhoods and more populist religious leaders who were often better placed to articulate the sentiments of the urban poor and rural populations. It is difficult to identify shared concerns as opposed to a shared religious idiom for expressing more localised concerns often of an economic or political nature, but it is also the case that movements were apt to spread very widely along the pilgrim/education routes and elicit multiple responses from different local communities in a way which is reminiscent of modern exchanges between the global and local. The rapid spread of neo-Sufism in the late eighteenth century from its origins among the scholars and Sufis of Fes, to Cairo, the Hijaz, Yemen and then back into




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North Africa in the form of new religious brotherhoods with an activist and reformist agenda which shared much with reformist ideas arriving in Mecca from the Indian subcontinent is one example of this. The percolation of Wahhabism from Arabia to Cairo, Tunis and Fes in the early nineteenth century is another. The primary shared concern which can be detected is that associated with a cluster of related concepts – corruption, innovation and assaults on the territory of the dar al-islam – all of which could trigger transstate responses conceptualised as renewal, reform or jihad. The mechanisms for mobilisation of the umma or any of its subsections were limited in this period but mosques, marketplaces or the meeting houses of the religious brotherhoods could all be used to circulate information and raise support by state and non-state actors. Another mechanism for the mobilisation of support was the request of legal opinions (fatawa) from scholars who specialised in jurisprudence to legitimise a particular course of action. In usual cases, a judge would request legal opinions when he felt that his own expertise was insufficient to judge a case and he wished for opinions based on a thorough study of the legal precedents. The geographic range of such requests was generally small: a judge would contact scholars in the nearest centre of learning. However, it was also possible for requests for opinions to be made by political leaders in which case requests might be sent great distances, laying bare the architecture of the international scholarly network and its influence on local Muslim communities. For instance, in his efforts to justify fighting his fellow Muslims as well as the French in Algeria, ‘Abd al-Qadir sought the legal advice of the scholars of Fes and then Cairo in the hopes of receiving fatawa which he could publicise among the ordinary population of western Algeria to enhance his legitimacy. One might argue that the disjuncture noted above between an international system which included Muslim and non-Muslim states and cultural zones predicated on religious difference was in fact the clearest evidence of the leverage which the umma had upon rulers and elites who were less concerned with religion than realpolitik. The historiography of the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire posits a growing cleavage between the elite and merchants who were increasingly willing to work with Christian European states and the mass of the population for whom the dar al-islam/dar al-harb divide remained unquestioned. A similar situation pertained in Morocco where the sultans felt bound to present trade and diplomacy to their subjects as the ‘maritime jihad’ and depict Christian states as their tributaries and diplomatic activity as the liberation of Muslim prisoners from Christian hands. Such visceral



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5 Conclusion The Ottoman imperial system and neighbouring Muslim states shared a heritage rooted in Islamic and Turco-Mongol principles of government which gave them a distinct cultural profile. However, the Ottoman Empire was a Eurasian entity and both its constituent parts and its Muslim neighbours were part of an international system of political and commercial import which stretched from Western Europe through to the Indian Ocean and was not defined by religion. The Ottomans made alliances with numerous European states, including France, Venice, Poland and the Habsburg Empire, as did Iran and Morocco. Tensions with European states reflected the struggle between great powers for their place on the world stage rather than competition between separate subglobal state systems and diminished as the Ottomans grew less powerful. Even the Ottoman claim to caliphate had an international as well as Islamic dimension. Nonetheless, Muslim states did uphold some sense of forming a sub-global society distinct from that of Christendom demonstrated by solidarity against Christian attacks, relatively flexible boundaries, and a commitment to facilitating the movement of pilgrims and scholars across the region. Frequent references to jihad/ghaza also differentiated Muslim states from their non-Muslim neighbours, despite playing a decreasing role in actual diplomatic practice. This reflected the fact that jihad was a prime site for the articulation of a global Muslim perspective and could not be ignored by the state. The umma of the Ottoman age was not heterogeneous but the institutions of pilgrimage and transstate education ensured that it was not ‘nationalised’ either. Although it is anachronistic to see the umma in the same light as contemporary world society, it was nonetheless a powerful conduit for ideas and attitudes, and the possibility that ‘Muslims’ would mobilise in rebellions or resistance was one of the factors determining how the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim states managed and presented their international relations. Just as many of the frontier areas of the Ottoman era contributed to the emergence of later national borders, so the umma continued to transgress and compete with them into the twentieth century.



popular antipathy to the ‘infidel’ is generally interpreted as fanaticism or at best conservatism but it was also a discourse about society’s expectations of rulers/the state at the local and global level which provided the foundations upon which pan-Islamism, Arabism and contemporary Islamism have built.

The Middle East Encounter with the Expansion of European International Society A. Nuri Yurdusev

Introduction This chapter examines the impact of the expanding European international society upon the Middle East and the latter’s response to the former. The Middle East encountered European international society via the Ottoman Empire which ruled much of the Middle East during the period of European expansion. Therefore, the chapter begins with an analysis of the integration of the Ottoman Empire into European international society and concentrates on such questions as to what extent the Ottoman Empire became Europeanised and how successfully the Ottoman Empire was (or was not) socialised into the institutions of European international society. This is to be shown through five institutions of the classical English school, namely the balance of power, diplomacy, international law, great power management and war. Then comes a treatment of whether the penetration of the Ottoman Empire by European international society, and later the break-up of the Empire and the colonisation of much of the Middle East by European powers, set the stage for the emergence of the post-colonial Middle East. Here, the Ottoman legacy and European impact is the major focus of analysis in respect of such issues as the formation of states, nationalism and secularism. Finally the chapter concludes by pointing out the weakness of ‘world society’ in the Middle East and relates it to the European expansion and its ramifications for the contemporary period. In order to avoid overlaps with the previous chapter, the major focus is here on Ottoman – European relations, especially in respect of the five institutions and the period of European penetration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 70



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In the classical accounts of the English school such as provided by Wight (1977), Bull (1977) and Watson (1992), it is the prevalent view that the Ottoman Empire was not part of European international society. Basically, it is held that the principal rules and institutions of European international society began to emerge in fifteenth-century Italy. They were then adopted by the monarchies north of the Alps in the sixteenth century and by the mid-seventeenth century it was more or less Europe-wide. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became more institutionalised and gradually expanded into the non-European parts of the world. The Ottomans did not take part in this system in the beginning and it officially became a member only with the Treaty of Paris of 1856. It is also noted that the membership of the Empire was disputable even after the Paris Treaty. The best way to describe the mutual position of the European states and the Empire, so the argument goes, might be to consider it as part of the European international system rather than European international society. Although Bull’s distinction between international society and international system may be questioned, and perhaps this is more so in the Turco-European case, I would argue that the Ottoman Empire can be considered as part of European international society when considered in relation to Bull’s requirement that the members of the society share in the working of common institutions. The Empire was, I suggest, inside European international society in its coexistence version and outside in the cooperative version. The origins of the European international society have been traced back to the mid-fifteenth century in Wight’s analysis. Similarly, with the conquest of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire became a formidable force next to the emerging European society. From its rise as a power in the beginning of the fourteenth century onwards, the Ottoman Empire expanded at the expense of Europe. It occupied, controlled and administered one-quarter to one-third of the European continent from the fourteenth century to the late nineteenth century. Therefore, the Ottoman Empire was in Europe when the European international society began to come into being. From its emergence as a formidable power, the Ottoman Empire had been a continuous consideration for the Europeans. So, the modern European society of states and the Ottoman imperial system were never isolated from each other. The Ottomans actively and intensively engaged in European affairs. It can be demonstrated that the Empire played a major



1 The Ottoman Empire and European international society

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part in the formation and working of the European states system and this shows that a process of mutual dependence operated between the two systems, despite the historical prejudices of the Europeans towards the Turk and the pretensions of self-sufficiency on the part of the Ottomans. The historical record enables us to claim that the Ottoman Empire shared in the working of the balance of power, that master institution of European international society. As early as the first stage of the Italian wars from 1494 onwards, the Ottoman Empire was an important actor in the Italian system, traditionally considered as the forerunner of the modern European system. For their part, the Italian courts were more than happy with the involvement of the Porte in their affairs. In 1494, faced by the first French triumphs in Italy, Naples and the papacy itself negotiated with the sultan for help against Charles VIII. In order to keep France out of Italy, when the Second Holy League was signed in 1495 with an almost Europe-wide participation, not just by the Italian states, Mattingly (1955: 136–7) tells us that the ambassador of Sultan Beyazid II was present, in a sense, as an observer at the signing ceremony. The New League is said to have transformed the Italian system into a European one. The Ottomans took part, as active participants, in the second stage of the Italian wars. The historical record shows that the Ottoman Empire became an active participant in the emerging European balance system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sixteenth-century Ottoman historian Sinan Chavush, for instance, argued for the alliance between Turkey and France in order to prevent France from aligning with the pope and the emperor against the Ottomans (Inalcık, 2001). The sultans thus pursued a conscious policy of balance vis-à-vis the European powers so that the rise of the nation-states was to a certain degree facilitated. The Ottomans encouraged and supported the English and Dutch in the period after 1580 when these nations proved to be the champions of European resistance to the Habsburgs’ attempts at hegemony. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, support for the Protestants and Calvinists was one of the fundamental principles of Ottoman policy in Europe. The Ottoman pressure on the Habsburgs was an important factor in the spread of Protestantism in Europe. The Westphalian settlement of 1648, the coexistence of the multiple sovereign states, became possible through this pressure on the Habsburgs; as observed by Watson: ‘The Habsburg bid to establish a hegemonial system in Christian Europe was defeated, decisive Westphalian formulation of the anti-hegemonial nature of the European states system was made possible by the Ottoman pressure on the Habsburgs’ (1992: 177–8, 216). Moreover, the Ottoman Empire pursued the balance policy



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in its trade relations with the Europeans, notably in terms of the Capitulations. In order to prevent the dominance of one state in the Levant trade they always favoured the rival nations. Against the Venetian dominance, they supported first the Genoese, then the Ragusans and then the Florentines in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century the French took the lead, and then in the seventeenth century came the English and the Dutch (Inalcık, 1994). Similarly, European sovereigns took into account the Sublime Porte in their calculations of the balance in Europe and did not hesitate, from time to time, to align with the sultan against each other. According to Dehio (1962: 40–1), the Ottoman Empire became a counter-weight to the unifying tendency represented by Charles V. The introduction or intervention of the Empire into the European balance of power system played a most significant part in preserving the freedom of the system of states. Indeed contemporary Europeans recognised and accepted Ottoman role in the European balance from the early sixteenth century on and saw the Ottoman Empire as part of the European balance system well into the nineteenth century. In the early sixteenth century, Francis I admitted that the Ottoman Empire was the only force to prevent the emerging states of Europe from being transformed into a Europe-wide empire by Charles V. In the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I opened relations with the Ottoman Empire. One of the motives of the queen was certainly the expansion of trade, and the second motive was the idea that the sultan could balance the Habsburgs in the East and consequently relieve Spanish pressure upon England. Elizabeth I even stressed that Protestantism and Islam were equally hostile to ‘idolatry’ (Catholicism). In granting Capitulations to the English and the Dutch, the sultan, too, considered that these nations were the champions of the struggle against the idolaters (Rodinson, 1987: 34–5; Inalcık, 1974: 52–3). In the late eighteenth century, the place of the Ottomans in the European balance system was acknowledged in the British Parliament. Similarly, it has been reported that Catherine the Great of Russia explicitly recognised it (Butterfield, 1966: 143; Davison, 1996: 175). It seems obvious that the Ottoman Empire was within the European balance system from very early on. It is even said that there was a ‘pattern of alliance’ between the Turk and Europe from the mid-fourteenth to the eighteenth century (Vaughan, 1954). In sum, the Ottoman Empire was an active participant and perhaps the ‘balancer’ in the balance of power in Europe from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries it was still a participant, though not in the determining position that it had once enjoyed. The Empire




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was part of the balance system both as a party in the actual articulation of multiple powers into a situation of equilibrium and as an actor that consciously pursued policies to preserve the balance and that was recognised as such. In diplomacy, too, we see that the Ottoman Empire worked together with the European states. As I have argued elsewhere (Yurdusev, 2004), the Ottoman Empire engaged in various diplomatic relations with the European states and had a favourable attitude towards diplomacy. Contrary to the conventional argument (Anderson, 1993), the relations between the Ottoman Empire and European states were not carried out within the framework of a permanent war between dar al-islam and dar alharb. When examining the Ottoman practice of diplomacy vis-à-vis the European states, one should take into consideration the following points. First, strictly speaking, the Ottoman Empire was not, as widely supposed, a Shari‘a state; nor was it a nation-state proper. Instead, it was an imperial system with claims to universal rule and self-sufficiency. Second, this imperial system developed side by side with the European states system and actively engaged with and in this system. It was not like the Chinese imperial system, which was isolated and apart from the European system. And third, the context in which modern European diplomacy originally developed should be taken into account. The development of modern diplomacy among the Italian city states and later in the wider European system occurred in interaction with the Ottomans. The experiences of the Italian states with the Ottoman Empire provided a significant input to the development of resident missions. ‘Indeed,’ concludes Goffman, ‘the formulating of some of the most essential elements of the modern world’s diplomatic system – permanent missions, extraterritoriality, and reciprocity – drew upon the experiences of the directors of Florentine, Genoese, and Venetian settlements in the Ottoman domain.’ He further notes that the extent of the extraterritorial rights the European resident missions enjoyed in Istanbul from the very beginning was achieved among the European states only after the end of religious wars in the seventeenth century (2002: 186–7). Indeed so. The implementation of the Aman (safe conduct) system via granting ahdnames to the non-Muslim communities within and Christian states outside the Ottoman world led to the extraterritorial rights and privileges enjoyed by the European representatives in the Ottoman Empire. Although the Sublime Porte did not reciprocate the European resident embassies until 1793, when the first resident embassy was opened in London, receiving but not sending resident ambassadors was not exclusively an Ottoman practice in the early centuries of the development



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of diplomacy. ‘Not all resident embassies were reciprocal’ before 1648, as the authoritative text informs us. Great powers were not enthusiastic about sending resident representatives to the courts of the lesser powers until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Mattingly, 1955: 60, 99). Furthermore, the so-called Ottoman unilateral practice was not a result of an outright negation. There were various reasons why the Ottomans refrained from sending permanent ambassadors until the late eighteenth century, but religion was not one of them, since the Sublime Porte did not send permanent ambassadors to Muslim powers either. Reciprocity in this matter required the existence of powers among which there was a condition of rough equality, or at least a nominal recognition of it. The Ottoman Empire, as an imperial system, did not recognise the notion of equality until the eighteenth century. However, among the contemporary non-European states or empires, the Ottoman case was unique. After all, it accepted that ambassadors might come to stay in Istanbul from the very beginning. The first English ambassador, Sir William Harbourne, was received by the sultan in 1583 in spite of fierce protest from the French. By contrast, more than 200 years later, Lord Macartney’s request to establish a permanent mission was refused by the Chinese emperor. Until the nineteenth century, the Europeans had no permanent embassies or missions in the non-European world, except Istanbul. Yet, the principal of reciprocity was keenly observed in practice by the Sublime Porte. In granting each ahdname (Capitulations), the Ottomans insisted upon the inclusion of reciprocal rights for their merchants. For example, Article XV of the non-ratified first French Capitulations of 1535 reads as follows: ‘In the dominions of the King reciprocal rights shall be granted to the subjects of the Grand Seignior’ (Hurewitz, 1975: 1–5). Similar clauses were entered into all subsequent Capitulations. Furthermore, though the Ottoman Empire did not reciprocate the European ambassadors until 1793, it frequently sent temporary envoys to the European courts. From 1384 to 1600, according to Mansell (1995: 193), 145 temporary envoys were sent by the sultan to Venice alone. The mission of most temporary envoys lasted for years. Therefore, it would not be wrong if we said that diplomacy between the Sublime Porte and the European courts was in fact permanent. Goffman (2002) and Berridge (2004) make the point that the Ottomans were an indispensable part of, and fully integrated into, the European diplomatic system by the seventeenth century. Diplomacy as an institution of European international society, among other things, involves resident embassies, rules of protocol, reciprocity, rights and immunities of ambassadors, multilateral conferences and




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mediation. The Sublime Porte observed rights and immunities of the envoys, rules of protocol and some sort of reciprocity. Indeed, the Ottomans showed interest in some of the seminal multilateral conferences of Europe before the Paris Conference of 1856. They negotiated with European powers at the Karlowitz Conference (Abou-El-Haj, 2004) and, upon the suggestion of Metternich, the Porte wanted to participate in the Vienna Conference of 1814. Yet due to Russian opposition this attempt was not actualised (Webster, 1921: 429–30). Similarly, from the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sublime Porte began to use frequently the mediation mechanism by accepting European powers as mediators and once suggesting to mediate itself (Naff, 1984: 156). Finally, the Sublime Porte indeed took up a receptive and very favourable attitude towards foreign envoys whether they were temporary or permanent ambassadors. All of their expenses were paid by the Ottoman government from the moment they entered into Ottoman territory until they left. This had been ‘the common practice of Christendom’ (Mattingly, 1955: 33), later renounced by the modern European states. Surprisingly, the Sublime Porte preserved this ‘practice of Christendom’ until 1794 (Unat, 1992: 14–16). The ambassadors were in theory the sultan’s guest. ‘If in other capitals ambassadors lived like princes,’ said Mansell, ‘in Constantinople they lived like kings’ (1995: 194). All this cannot be expected of a power that did not share in the working of diplomacy. With regard to other institutions and rules of European international society – namely international law, great power management and war – we can again find some historical records, though not as intensive as the case for balance of power and diplomacy. In respect of international law, the Ottoman Empire long observed the customary principles of uti possidetis and pacta sunt servanda. One reason for the renewal of hostilities with Russia in 1787 was, the Porte declared, Russia’s failure to carry out the clauses of the capitulation of 1783. And we see that Sultan Selim III explicitly referred to the rules of international law in 1799 when Russian warships entered the Straits unannounced (Naff, 1984: 157–60). References by the Ottoman authorities to international law in their dealings with the Europeans may be found as early as the first half of the eighteenth century. Grand Vizier Koja Ragip Pasha used the arguments of Grotius in his meetings with the European ambassadors in Istanbul in the early eighteenth century and we see increasing references to the rules of international law from the late eighteenth century onwards. By the mid-nineteenth century the Empire can be said to have fairly adopted international law as the code of international relations (Horowitz, 2005).



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As mentioned earlier, from the eighteenth century onwards the Ottoman Empire gradually adopted the notion of legal equality. The principle of legal equality as a code of behaviour not just among European powers but also in respect of the non-European societies came to be accepted only after the eighteenth century. International law requires equality more than diplomacy. It is thus meaningful to conclude that with these developments of the notion of legal equality on the part of the Ottomans and the Europeans, the Sublime Porte began to enjoy international law by the mid-nineteenth century. The Ottoman Empire can rightly be considered as a great power and part of the great power management system. It is conventionally held that great power management as an institution of European international society came into existence in the early eighteenth century when it was invoked in the treaties of Utrecht. Yet, great powers existed from the very beginning and despite the frequent attempts at transforming the system into an imperial system, there had always been multiple great powers. Even in its declining decades, the Ottoman Empire with its sources of power was considered to be one of the great powers right through the nineteenth century. The Ottoman Empire was part of the great power management system not just because it was a great power in actual terms, but also because it was recognised as such within the system. When I examined the balance of power, I already hinted that the Ottoman Empire acted as a great power and was recognised as such by the rulers in Europe in the sixteenth century. We have been told that Charles V and his successors and French rulers until the eighteenth century recognised two emperors, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Turkish Sultan (Koebner, 1961: 51–60). Similarly Turkey was considered as one of the great powers that were responsible for the establishment and maintenance of universal peace in Europe. Emeric Cruce, in his Nouvea Cynee, published in 1623, proposed an association of states that comprised Turkey, and furthermore Turkey was given the first rank under the purely symbolic chairmanship of the pope. Later William Penn (1693) and Saint-Pierre (1712) also included Turkey in their proposals for an association of states and Turkey was given the same number of representatives as the other European powers (Hinsley, 1963: 20–1, 34–5). With the 1856 Paris Treaty the Ottoman Empire was formally accepted as part of the concert of Europe and became a member of the circle of great powers. From 1856 until the outbreak of the First World War, Turkey was invited, with the other great powers, to send delegates to every general conference as a result of its admission to the circle of great powers (Hinsley, 1963: 235). On the part




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of the Ottomans we can see that from the fifteenth century onwards they consciously maintained that they were the guardians of the lesser powers. Even in the nineteenth century the Ottoman statesman Ali Pasha on the eve of the Paris Conference of 1856 claimed that the Empire was essential for the peace in Europe (Türkegeldi, 1987: 60–1). It is thus fair to conclude that the Ottoman Empire was actually and legally part of the great power club in European international society. On war, it can be asserted that the Ottoman Empire to some extent adopted the idea of war that gradually became prevalent among European states, and from the eighteenth century onwards adopted the customs and conventions of war that were accepted by European international society. Although the idea of religious war (ghaza) was the norm in the Ottoman Empire in its early centuries, even then we can find the idea of war understood in secular and mundane terms. It is reported that in a dialogue between Sultan Murad I (r. 1359–89) and his grand vizier, besides the religious necessities, the interest of the state was cited as the reason to go to war (Palabıyık, 2007: 188). From the seventeenth century onwards the conception of war was largely understood in terms of what we nowadays call the reason of state. The Ottomans frequently participated in European wars and from the late eighteenth century onwards they came to accept the basic rules of war that became current in Europe. They adopted the form of military regiments in Europe, and even the dress code of the soldiers was inspired by the French army. What one can draw from the foregoing analysis of the mutual positions of the emerging European international system and the Ottoman imperial system is that the two systems were closely interwoven and in constant interaction. They had frequent relations with each other, the nature of these relations was not always hostile and they shared in the working of some common institutions. Despite all those contacts, wars, conflicts, alliances, agreements and commercial exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, and the actual control, administration and government by the Ottomans of one-quarter to one-third of the European continent for half a millennium, it is often said that the Empire was in Europe but not of Europe (Naff, 1984: 143). In spite of the existence of extensive relations and sharing in the working of basic institutions, the fact that the Empire was considered in Europe but not of Europe shows not only the differences between the two systems in the beginning (nation-states vs empire), but also the cultural rift that lasted until well into the twentieth century. The Ottoman Empire and the Turks have been used as the Other of Europe from the late medieval period to perhaps the present times (Neumann and Welsh, 1991; Yurdusev, 2007).



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2 Ottoman legacy and the Middle East In the emergence and the development of the contemporary Middle East, the expansion of European international society had a profound effect. This effect was exerted, on the one hand, by direct or indirect rule by the Europeans, a phenomenon that may be traced back to Napoleon’s incursion into Egypt in 1798, but fully realised after the First World War. On the other hand, the effect of the European expansion was exerted via the Ottoman Empire. In other words, the increasingly Europeanised Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century performed a kind of transmitter role for the Middle East. The contemporary Middle East is therefore the result of the age-old indigenous, local traditions and formations, the late Ottoman rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and European control and colonisation in the twentieth century. When discussing the Ottoman legacy it is I think more adequate to examine it in terms of both international relations and the formation of Middle Eastern states. By the late eighteenth century the decline of the Ottoman Empire was apparent. The internal decline of the Empire coincided with the expansion of European international society. This irreversible shift in the balance of power led to the formal adoption of European diplomatic conventions and practices and eventually the European ideas of how to organise international society. As outlined above, the Ottoman Empire was familiar with these institutions and ideas and engaged with European countries in terms of them. What happened from the late eighteenth century onwards was the more wholesale acceptance of European institutions. Some scholars even argued that Ottoman diplomacy was truly Westernised in the nineteenth century (Davison, 1986; Naff, 1963). This resulted in the acquaintance of not only the central bureaucrats of the Empire, but also the provincial governors, with the norms, rules and practices of European international society. In response to the rise and penetration of Europe into the Ottoman world, the Ottoman Empire embarked upon conscious reform policies first initiated by Sultan Selim III in the late eighteenth century and precipitated with the reform edicts of Tanzimat (1839) and Islahat (1856), and culminating in the First (1876) and Second (1908) Constitutional



It is therefore possible to make a strong case for the membership of the Ottoman Empire in European international society in terms of institutions and, to some extent, the rules; but the case is rather weak in terms of common ‘cultural’ values.

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Eras (Davison, 1963; Findley, 1980; Karpat, 1972). These reforms introduced the European norms and rules with regard to the basic rights of Ottoman subjects such as legal equality of all citizens and right to private property. The latter was a result of the Land Code of 1858, an attempt to reorganise land-ownership within the Empire (Rogan, 2002). The Vilayet (Province) Law of 1864 defined and reorganised Ottoman territories for administrative purposes and opened the way for centralisation. The formation of a European-style government consisting of a ministerial cabinet had already begun in the early nineteenth century. With the reform process, European ideas and governmental techniques were adopted. The Ottoman reforms were effectively policies of centralisation aiming at the curtailment of the power of local notables and increased control by the centre. This was an attempt to transform the composite structure of the Empire into a consolidated nation-state, the prevalent contemporary norm in Europe. Although the provincial and local notables were not eliminated and the power of Istanbul over the provinces was never fully effective, from Hijaz to Tripoli the Middle East was brought under control and provincial administration was reformed so that a sense of Ottoman ‘nationhood’ emerged. Some even argued that a strong state tradition highly autonomous of societal forces was established and this formed one of the enduring legacies of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East (Özbudun, 1996). I think the consolidated state structures which are highly autonomous from the societal forces cannot be attributed to Ottoman practice; it is rather the result of the later secular states in the twentieth century. But with respect to the focus of this chapter, it can be said that the reform policies of the Ottoman Empire provided a basis for the centralised government and sovereign statehood that was later realised in the Middle East of the twentieth century. The fact that the Ottoman Empire had been in close interaction with the European states and shared in the working of the institutions of European international society, and that the Ottoman reforms introduced European ideas, norms and governmental techniques, can be taken as one of the factors in the relatively easy establishment of a sovereign state system in the Middle East. For one thing, some of the early governmental and administrative elites of the newly emerged states had already served within the Ottoman governing elite. It is often said that the number of primarily Arabic-speaking people participating in the Ottoman governing elite was negligible. Barbir (1980: 75–7; 1996: 102–3), for example, noted that two or three people of Arab ethnic background served as grand viziers and no more than 3–4 per cent of



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the official religious hierarchy, the ‘ulama, were of Arab background in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Against this contention, one could refer to Hourani (1981: 2) telling us that in Istanbul and provincial capitals governing families of the Middle East were socialised in the formal and elaborate Ottoman manners, or resort to Shlaim (1995: 6) who makes the point that so many of the statesmen, soldiers and administrators of the successor states emerged from Ottoman political culture. More importantly, it must be remembered that in the Ottoman Empire, no single ethnic background had a dominance or primacy in the composition of the central governing elite. The Ottoman bureaucracy more or less reflected the Empire’s multiethnic and multireligious population (Kuneralp, 1999). In the provinces and autonomous regions, the Ottomans worked with the local-indigenous notables and recognised their authority deriving from ethnic, religious, local or traditional sources. Furthermore, it is well known that until the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century, the size of the Ottoman bureaucracy itself was not considerable. As Yapp (1987: 36–45) persuasively showed, in Iran, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire there was minimal government at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is with the modernisation period of the nineteenth century that the size of the Ottoman bureaucracy increased and the centre began to have effective control over the regions. It was in this period that the first generation of the governing elites of the successor states were socialised and became familiar with the ideas and practices of European states. We see this even in the field of language. As Lewis (1996) reminded us, Arabic political terms such as ‘state’, ‘republic’, ‘government’, ‘motherland’ acquired their present meanings and connotations via the usage of the late Ottoman elite. No doubt, some of the elites, especially in Egypt, were subjected to direct European influence through various channels and they acquired some European ideas, for example nationalism, independently. The Ottoman legacy may also be observed in the formation of Middle Eastern states as well. There is no doubt that the idea of self-rule, despite the policies of centralisation, had its origins in the Ottoman and preOttoman practice. Yet the idea of sovereignty as having the final and monopolised authority in the jurisdictional area defined by territoriality was neither indigenous nor Ottoman. This notion of sovereignty and territoriality was definitely a European import. The conception of clear-cut territorial demarcation came with European colonisation in the early twentieth century and later decolonisation. However, during the Ottoman period, and especially with the late Ottoman vilayet organisation of the Middle East, we see some conception of territoriality. In the




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classical period, territorial borders coincided with the age-old customs of local peoples: they were never clear-cut, and always highly permeable. In the late nineteenth century, with the impact of Europe, territoriality in the European sense had found its way into the Ottoman world. Article 1 of the first Ottoman Constitution of 1876 proclaimed that the Empire was a territorial unit that could never be divided for any reason. The loose territorial boundaries under the classical Ottoman period and the later conception of territoriality had some impact upon the territorial borders of the present states in the Middle East. In North Africa, the political/territorial boundaries more or less followed the lines drawn by the Ottomans between Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco. The Sahara was treated as no-man’s-land. The French annexed it to Algiers. The conflicts that emerged after Maghreb independence in North Africa, argues Raymond, resulted more from European than Ottoman legacy. The eastern boundary of the Ottoman Empire between Iraq and Iran and the internal boundaries in the Middle East, divided into sanjaks (districts) and eyalets (provinces), constituted the political/territorial boundaries of the emerging states of the central Middle East. While the Ottoman delimitations were complying with the practical and historical factors that worked for centuries, the colonial powers, Britain and France, did not comply with these factors and paved the way for the subsequent conflicts as in the case of the French decision to establish a Greater Lebanon and the English one to divide Palestine (Raymond, 1996: 119–23). For the delimitation, the Ottoman formula was ratification of the equilibrium of the local forces and arbitration when they had disputes. It is thus clear that in both the introduction to the Middle East of the delimitation of the political/territorial boundaries, and the socialisation of local elites into the ideas and practices of European international society, the Ottoman administration had a significant role. Those ideas and practices were consolidated with the subsequent European penetration.

3 The impact of Europe on the Middle East The impact of Europe on the Middle East and other non-European regions of the world is a direct result of the rise and expansion of the modern European states from the sixteenth century onwards. This impact was exercised through the formidable power of the Europeans in terms of military, economic and political capabilities and by direct and indirect mechanisms of control such as bilateral or multilateral treaty arrangements (Ottoman Empire and Iran), occupation (first starting with the



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French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and later experienced by much of the Middle East, whether short-lived or long-lasting), settlement or colonisation (Algeria), protectorates and spheres of influence (North Africa, Persian Gulf, Arabia, Egypt) and mandates (Palestine, Syria, Iraq). Whatever the form of European control was, there is no doubt that it was effective, so it would not be wrong to say that the Middle East in modern times was largely formed in shape and name by the external/European pressure or penetration. The very term ‘Middle East’ was invented in 1902 as a function of the British imperial strategy (Adelson, 1994: 22). The European penetration then named the Middle East and shaped it in its present form. Halliday (2005a: 86–90) identifies four processes, initiated by the European penetration, which shaped the contemporary Middle East. The first is the formation of states as coercive political and administrative bodies. Second come the attempts by these states to create national identities based on, among others, historical and traditional claims that are very often irredentist. The third one is secularisation, again forged by states to consolidate their control over the society. Finally, there occurred radical reactions against those policies pursued by the colonial powers and nationalist states such as ethnic and religious or Islamist movements. In sum, we have (1) state formation, (2) nationalism, (3) secularisation and (4) radicalism. First we see that the Middle East was articulated into multiple nation-states. The near-universal acceptance of the nation-state as the principal form of political organisation was the result of the global expansion of European international society, and the Middle East was no exception. Before the European penetration began in the Middle East and North Africa, nationality, territoriality and ethnicity did not constitute the basis of political identification. Religious, tribal, local and imperial formations formed the socio-political space and they overlapped. The polity was not determined by a demarcated territory, nor a monopoly-claiming sovereign, nor a body of centralised organs, nor a large-scale uniform identity, but simply by allegiance to the immediate ruler and the remote head of the umma, the caliphate. Lewis (2002: 102–3) indicates that in the vast and rich historiographic literature of Islam there were the histories of the umma, ruling dynasties and local cities. There were no histories of Arabs or Arabia, Turks or Turkey, Iranians or Iran. Although these were very ancient entities, they were very modern notions. Nation-state as a kind of polity defined by territoriality, sovereignty, centrality and nationality is a very late modern creation in the Middle East and this became possible through the European penetration from the beginning of the nineteenth century.




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It is a prevalent view that the present interstate system of the Middle East is a colonial creation. As nation-states were alien formations to the region, and their boundaries and structures were designed according to the interests and trade-offs of the colonial powers, it is thus argued, the working of the interstate system in the region had frequent difficulties and was subjected to serious and violent conflicts. As there were very few established boundaries in the Middle East before the First World War, it is argued that all the twentieth-century boundaries of the Middle East are artificial (Walker, 1995). According to Shlaim (1995: 17), most of the states created by Britain and its allies in the aftermath of the First World War were weak and unstable. Their frontiers were arbitrary and rulers lacked legitimacy. As the frontiers were arbitrary, illogical and unjust, it led to powerful irredentist tendencies. Korany (1987: 48, 62) agrees with Shlaim and stresses the artificiality and alien character of the states that emerged after the mandate period. Because of its alien origins, the state system was faced with two pressures: internal strains within the polity and territorial dispute vis-à-vis each other. Harik (1987: 21–2) on the other hand argues that the view about Arab states being the creation of colonialism is a historical misperception. Many of the Arab states are the products of indigenous forces mostly unrelated to European colonialism and in most cases predating it. This debate about whether the Middle Eastern states are alien creations or indigenous formations seems to stem from a rather reductionist view. Each argument has a point, but not the whole picture. It is true that most of the present states of the Middle East came into being in the twentieth century and most of them have been shaped by the colonial powers. Yet there are some states (for example Iran, Yemen and Morocco) that could be traced back to pre-colonial even pre-Ottoman periods. It is also true that states in the Middle East have indigenous elements. The broad picture may be understood more adequately if the present Middle Eastern states are seen as the result of (a) the European impact, (b) the Ottoman legacy and (c) indigenous, local elements. Of these three, I consider the role of the European penetration weightier than the other two. Halliday (2005a: 43) makes a similar argument, though he underestimates the Ottoman legacy. According to Halliday, although the states in the Middle East have ancient origins and long-standing existence, in its present form the Middle Eastern state is the product of the impact on the region of external pressure, that of Western military power and the extending capitalist market. This is I think because the European idea of the centralised sovereign territorial state has gained a universal prevalence and the Middle East has not been immune from this. The state as a type



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of polity defined by territoriality (clear-cut horizontal demarcation of boundaries), sovereignty (the state being the final arbiter within its territory and being recognised as such), centrality (the existence of central public bodies monopolising authority and some tasks) and nationality (the imposition by the state of a uniform identity upon its citizens) is something that emerged in Europe and then in the course of the expansion of European international society became universal practice. The states in the Middle East have adopted those characteristics to some extent and they tried to incorporate various elements of Europe, Ottoman past and indigenous formations within this structure of the modern nation-state. Today, at the formal level, it can be said that the sovereign states in the Middle East are not much different from states elsewhere. In other words, the export and adoption of the Westphalian form of state in the Middle East seems to have formally worked, as we see that these states participate in the global international system with their territorial borders and sovereign body, and an apparatus of administration and official diplomatic relations. However, at the operational level, it can also be asserted that they are not working adequately as the state structures are not fully congruent with the indigenous forces and they are not successful in the performance of some basic functions for their citizens. As pointed out by Anderson (1987: 3), ‘modern bureaucratic states do not appear full blown with international recognition of sovereignty’. Despite the incapacity of many of them the states in the Middle East have proven to be resilient. So far, the challenges to the existing sovereign states system of the Middle East, stemming from panTurkism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism and ethnic separatism, have not succeeded. Furthermore, nearly all of the states in the Middle East appear to have got on well with the institutions of the global international society such as diplomacy, international law, sovereignty and balance of power. To conclude so far, as a result of the European impact, the sovereign territorial state with its interstate system and institutions has successfully been transplanted into, or adopted by, the Middle East. Together with the sovereign territorial state, the idea of nationality and nationalism can be viewed as another significant institution that spread to the Middle East through European penetration. The idea of nationality as a focus of collective social identification developed together with the sovereign territorial state. Although most of the national identities in the modern period were built upon the centuries-old social categories of various kinds such as linguistic, ethnic, tribal and local communities, the nation signifying a massive society and constituting a uniform identity came into being with the emergence of what has come to be




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called the nation-state. It is conventionally held that either nations which had already been there before the emergence of the modern state came under the jurisdiction of the state (as is the case with the English and French nations) or the emerging state created a nation (as is the case with most nations). Even in the first case, Smith (1991: 100) rightly observed that the elements of design were available in the formation of national identity, that is to say, Jacobin nationalism and Tudor and Stuart centralisation. The state and nation are linked to each other and they are modern formations. It is now commonplace to distinguish two types of nationality/nationalism, one being civic-territorial and the other ethniclinguistic. But, in both cases, one can detect the conscious attempts or constructivist policies by the states to forge national identity upon the masses. The introduction of nationalism and nationality into the Ottoman lands and thus the Middle East took place after the French revolution with the popularisation of the so-called principle of national selfdetermination. The idea of national self-determination spread to the Balkans and Eastern Europe in the early nineteenth century and began to be expressed by elites in the central Ottoman lands and the Middle East in the form of Turkish nationalism defended by Young Turks and Arab nationalism by some Arabs, especially in Egypt, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, in a pamphlet titled ‘The Manifesto of the Arab Nation’, published in Alexandria in 1881, we see the expression of a pan-Arab nationalism against the Turks (Kürkçüo˘ glu, 1982: 27–8). Yet the idea of Arab nationalism and independence of Arab peoples prevailed only after the First World War. The so-called Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War was rather limited and not widely supported by the Arab elite and masses. According to Hourani (1981: 71–2), the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the Allies in the First World War was the turning point in the growth of the movements of self-determination in the Middle East. The collapse of the Empire led the Arabs to adopt a fully nationalist discourse that included independence. Otherwise, they would have opted for something less than independence, sharing the government. Hourani (1981: 186) also makes the point that until the 1940s the prevalent form of nationalism in the Middle East was territorial; it was only after the 1940s that ethnic (pan-Arabism included) nationalism became prevalent. I think this is because of, on the one hand, the enduring existence of the traditional identifications of religious, tribal and local kind, and, on the other hand, the emergence of some states and the growth in the capacity of the existing states, in the Middle East after the mid-twentieth century.



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Nationalisms of various types (particular or general, ethnic or territorial) in the Middle East have been expressed by different intellectuals or elites from the late nineteenth century onwards. However, it was only with the conscious attempts of the emerging states that nationalism became a potent force in the Middle East in the twentieth century. The contemporary nationalism in the Middle East may be said to have basically two versions. One is the nationalism of the particular individual states/countries/nations, including various Arab and non-Arab states. The second one is the Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism that transcends individual Arab states and becomes a region-wide force. Perhaps one may add a third kind of nationalism in the name of ‘Islamist nationalism’, as many Islamist movements, despite their universal appeal, locate their so-called ‘community of believers’ within the bounds of nation-state, or they seem to adopt the modern state as the valid polity. Pan-Arabism, once potent and fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, has now lost its appeal. Particular nationalisms forged by the states are influential in the Middle East and seem to be well established. Today we have both Jordanians and Palestinians, and a Jordanian is not simply one from Jordan, or a Palestinian one from Palestine. A Jordanian is one who has some identifiable characteristics that are to some extent different from those owned by a Palestinian. However, nationality in the Middle East is still far from being a civic attribute of a particular society in terms of some common symbols and mutual legal rights and duties. It is partly from the incapacity of the sovereign states, partly from the search for legitimacy by the states and partly from the continuous force of non-national identifications, that particular nationalisms of various states very often assume an irredentist and universal character and become a source of conflict in the Middle East. In respect of the impact of Europe upon the Middle East, secularisation is worth mentioning. There may be identified three major factors behind secularisation in the Middle East. First, with the developments in transportation and communication technologies and the policies of the Egyptian and the Ottoman rulers to send pupils to Europe to be trained in Western techniques in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Middle Easterners got familiar with secularism. Second, there was the ‘civilising’ mission of the expanding European international society. According to Watson (1984: 31), one notable effect of the nineteenth-century European expansion over the globe was the creation throughout Asia, Africa and Oceania of Europeanised or Westernised elites. The Middle East was no exception in this process and it continued in the twentieth century. The early Europeanised or Westernised elites in the Middle East




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had adopted an aloof attitude towards Islam and became the defenders of staunch secularism. Finally, the emerging nationalist states, mostly ruled by the Westernised elites, implemented forceful policies of secularism either as part of their adopted mission or as efforts to consolidate their power, especially against the traditional ‘ulama. Secularisation as an impact of Europe on the Middle East had significant effects, some of which are still going on. First of all, there occurred a concern for religion. In the words of Binder (1988: 83), ‘no other cultural region is as deeply anxious about the threat of cultural penetration and Westernization’ as the Middle East. Islam has thus become the focal point of the reactions against Europe and the West. Second, the European penetration contributed substantially to the ‘bifurcation of the subjected Muslim societies into secularist elites and Islamic clusters’ (Saikal, 2003: 33–4). While the secularist elites, in most states backed by the European/ Western powers, aimed at the transformation of their societies along Western lines, the Islamic clusters reacted against the secularisation of Muslim societies by the indigenous elites and their European backers. The outcome was polarised societies and the continuity and consolidation of autocracy of the elites. The formation of sovereign centralised states, nationalism and secularism resulted in more autocracy than freedom. According to Lewis (2002: 53–4), the cumulative effect of reform and modernisation upon Middle Eastern societies was paradoxically not to increase freedom but to reinforce autocracy: (1) by strengthening the central power of the state through the new apparatus of communication and enforcement that modern technology placed at its disposal, and (2) by abrogating the limiting traditional powers such as the provincial gentry and magistracy, the urban patriciate, the ‘ulama and the old-established military bodies such as the Corps of Janissaries. Besides, there was the authority of the holy law that preceded any ruler. The intermediate forces derived their authority not from any central ruler, but from tradition and recognition. With the reform policies in the nineteenth century and the emergence of nation-states in the twentieth century, those intermediate powers were either abolished or brought under control. Before the advent of the nation-state, the man in the street had in a sense more room for manoeuvre between the imperial/universal authority and the intermediate powers. When in the twentieth century the secularist and (in some countries non-secularist) state elites wanted to preserve the vested interests that they acquired in the course of decolonisation and statebuilding, autocratic state structures were consolidated. Therefore, ‘the most insignificant tinpot dictator (of the present day) wields a despotic



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authority beyond the wildest imaginings of the caliphs and sultans of the past’ (Lewis, 1997: 124). The result has been, as Halliday (2005a: 317) argued, that the Middle Eastern state served to block or resist change from within and without. In most countries, the state contained those pressures and movements for change that society generated. To sum up so far, it is fair to say that European expansion initiated some forces (for example nationalist movements and secular elites), processes (for example Europeanisation and secularisation) and arrangements (for example mandate system and clientelism) that resulted in the successful establishment of an interstate society in the Middle East as part of the global international society. However, as shown above, some of the problems in the smooth working of this society also stem from the very process of its development.

4 Conclusion This chapter began with an analysis of the Ottoman Empire and European international society. I have shown that, contrary to conventional argument, the Ottoman Empire shared in the working, and even contributed to the development, of some of the institutions of European international society. Of course, it cannot be said that the Empire was fully part of the European system in its classical period given that it had pretensions of universalism and self-sufficiency, and a crusading spirit and cultural rift remained between the two. My contention is that this rift has been exaggerated based upon mutual rhetoric rather than the actual relations. In the nineteenth century, the Empire became nearly a full member of the European system and was heavily influenced by Europe. The implication for the Middle East of the integration of the Ottoman Empire into European international society is the relatively easy adaptation by the Middle Eastern states to the institutions of the global international society. As I have pointed out, not only the central bureaucrats but also the local governing elite of the Empire became familiar with the ideas, norms, rules and institutions of European international society during the period of Ottoman modernisation. Even the early rulers and governing elite of the emerging states of the Middle East, such as Egypt, Hijaz, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria, served in the Ottoman central institutions. For the present-day Middle East, the Ottoman Empire and its legacy may seem remote. Yet, as I have shown, in the making of the Middle East the Ottoman legacy had been effective. Indeed, we can find the traces of the Ottoman legacy not only in terms of its later period, as outlined




A. Nuri Yurdusev

above, but also in terms of its classical period. Just to give an example, it was through the Ottoman Empire that the local, indigenous formations in the Middle East survived into the twentieth century. As to the question of what influences were formed and transmitted to the contemporary Middle East by the Ottoman Empire and what were directly adopted from or imposed by Europe, we can cite the procedural institutions of diplomacy, balance of power, war and international law to be the examples of institutions channelled by the Ottoman legacy. The Ottoman Empire was to some extent influential in the adoption and formation of the sovereign state and nationality as well. Yet the ideas of sovereign territorial state, nationalism and secularism have been transplanted into the Middle East more by European impact than by the Ottoman Empire. The elimination of great power management in the regional scale is another result of the European expansion. Speaking of the ‘Islamic international society’ centred on the Middle East and West Asia, Buzan (2004: 239) declared: ‘While the interstate side of this sub-global international society is largely in conformity with the Westphalian elements of global interstate society, a case might be made that the interhuman and transnational elements are at least potentially, and up to a point in practice, in tension with it.’ The conformity with the interstate side of the global international society is the indication of the successful implantation of the nation-state structures, with respect to their external interactions, in the Middle East. The tension with the interhuman and transnational elements and some values (for example democracy and human rights) of the global society may result from the weakness of transnational elements, the internal tension of the Middle Eastern system between the states and their societies, and consequently the emergence of the transnational movements in reaction to the autocratic state structures and their supporters within the global system. One consequence of the expansion of Europe into the Middle East was that with the implantation of nationalism and centralised sovereign states and secularism, two traditional transnational elements of the Middle East, namely the ‘ulama and the tajir (merchant) were greatly diminished. The traditional ‘ulama was not a monolithic body. While they limited the power of the rulers and thus created space for interhuman elements, they were not totally against the Western/European values, like the present-day fundamentalists. For example, Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, a prominent member of the late Ottoman ‘ulama, defended the islahat from the point of Islamic principles. State–society polarisation as a result of secularism and vested interests of the bureaucratic elites hindered the development of interhuman and transnational elements in the Middle



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East. The global society seems to face with tension on two levels in the Middle East. On the one hand, the drive for democracy and human rights in the Middle East shown on the part of the European/Western countries causes tension between the state elites of the Middle East and the global international society. On the other hand, the actual or perceived support of the Europeans/Westerners for the autocratic elites leads to tension between the masses of the Middle East and the global society. Another source of tension is of course the Islamist movements. In response to the European expansion, the Middle East can then be said to have successfully adopted the interstate system, especially its institutions and rules, and inclined towards its pluralist version rather than solidarist version. The world society elements are weak and hindered by historical and present factors. The response of the Middle East to the values and norms of the global international society, especially those values pertaining to interhuman and state–society relations, is problematic because of the historical and present cultural rift between Muslim societies and Westerners and also because of the rift within Muslim societies that takes place between secularist/autocratic elites and the masses. A final question that needs to be addressed comes out of the argument of this chapter. If the Ottoman Empire shared in the working of the classical institutions of European international society and even developed some of them together, then how does this relate to the global/subglobal argument? Since those European–Ottoman institutions became internationalised, there is the implication that the Middle East was in some sense always a part of the global structures. To the extent that this is true, those global institutions were not an imposition from outside, and therefore this weakens the global/sub-global argument in favour of the Middle East being an active part of the global structures from the beginning. The Middle East had a much longer socialisation into what became the global institutions of international society than other parts of the third world. Indeed so. The conclusion is that this analysis of the relation between Europe, the Ottoman Empire and the contemporary Middle East leads us to a revision of the conventional account of the development/expansion of international society from Europe to the globe provided in the classical English school. Instead of presuming five or so separate regional international societies in the early modern period as stated by, for instance Bull and Watson, one needs to be more cautious and acknowledge the already existing bonds between the regional societies of Europe, the Middle East, India and China in the Old World.




The Primary Institutions of the Middle Eastern Regional Interstate Society Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

Introduction The objective of this chapter is to review the primary institutions of international society in relation to the Middle East, and analyse how they agree or differ from the global understanding. Given the constitutive character of institutions in forming international society and defining its nature, this exercise will help to elucidate the questions whether the Middle East is a regional international society and where the region stands in relation to the global pattern. This chapter is a continuation of Barry Buzan’s work on applying the concepts of English school theory to exploring possible sub-global international societies that could exist within the global international society. The chapter builds on Buzan’s conceptual developments on primary institutions, and reviews the global institutions of international society, their interpretations in the Middle East (how they differ from the global pattern) and what other distinctive regional institutional developments there might be, if any. After analysing each institution individually, I will evaluate whether there is a case for calling the Middle East a regional international society. Chapter 10 will pick up on the implications that this would have for international society. The analysis of each institution will be structured around two issues: (a) Presence and interpretation of the global institution in the Middle East: whether the institution is shared with the global level, and whether it presents distinctive regional interpretations. 92



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Primary Institutions of Regional Interstate Society

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Master institutions

Derivative institutions

Sovereignty

Non-intervention International law Bilateralism Multilateralism Boundaries Alliances War Balance of power Self-determination Popular sovereignty Democracy Human rights Humanitarian intervention Trade liberalisation Financial liberalisation Hegemonic stability Species survival Climate stability

Diplomacy Territoriality Great power management

Nationalism

Equality of people Market


Source: Buzan, 2004: 187.

(b) Differences with the global level: whether the Middle East shares fewer institutions than prevail at the global level and, by the same token, whether it has institutions not present at the global level. The point of departure is Buzan’s definition of primary institutions: ‘Primary institutions are durable and recognised patterns of shared practices rooted in values held commonly by the members of interstate societies, and embodying a mix of norms, rules and principles’ (Buzan, 2004: 181). They are divided into master institutions, and derivatives of each of those institutions (Table 5.1).

1 Sovereignty Presence and interpretation of sovereignty in the Middle East The institution of sovereignty constitutes the heart of international society, since it allows states to assert both their authority within a defined territory, and their membership of the society of states. Several chapters of this book touch upon different aspects of sovereignty in the Middle East, mainly Chapters 1 and 9. In this



Table 5.1 Contemporary international institutions (master and derivative).

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(a) Formation of the state: element of external imposition and creation of artificial borders. (b) The struggles of Arab nationalism and its role in reinforcing the state and the identity within those borders. (c) Relative victory of sovereignty. The formation of the modern Middle East was a product of the First World War and the disputes among the great powers. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were directly responsible for the creation of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and had a substantial degree of influence on the shape that the other states of the region took. This creation of artificial borders needed other tools to solidify itself as a lasting order in the Middle East, which is where the second point comes into play: Arab nationalism. Arab nationalism will be visited later in this chapter, and to a greater depth in Chapter 7. Its importance here is given by the two manifestations that it had within the institution of sovereignty, partly as a threat (pan-Arabism) and partly as an aid (territorial nationalism). PanArabism, by its nature, aspired to the utmost Arab unity threatening the sovereignty of the new fragile borders, and wanting to rejoin what had been dismembered by the creation of the states with artificial borders. The institution of sovereignty, however, benefited from the fact that pan-Arabism did support the idea of the individual states to achieve independence from the imperial powers as a necessary first step towards Arab unification. Pan-Arabism never saw its dream accomplished, not to mention that countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen felt little desire to embrace the ideal. On the contrary, after pan-Arabism sovereignty was more securely placed. The more compatible form of Arab nationalism with sovereignty was territorial nationalism, guided by territorial independence rather than political unification. Initially inspired by anti-colonialism, it was then adopted by the political elites in their struggle for statehood, their opposition to the mandate system, and the unification of their peoples within the newly created borders. In 1945 the Charter of the League of Arab States prioritised the respect for sovereignty. The next decades unleashed a series of tensions and threats around the charter’s call for sovereignty, from external pressures pre- and post-Cold



chapter, three aspects are important when discussing the presence and interpretation of this institution in the Middle East:

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War and the enormous impact of oil, to internal regional disputes and power struggles. The First Gulf War reinforced the triumph of sovereignty by shaking off the remaining pan-Arabist aspirations in favour of the increased recognition of the need for each country to protect its borders, as well as the right of each state to arrange its own security even if this meant getting help from outsiders to the region. As Barnett puts it, ‘strategic and symbolic interaction was responsible for creating new and separate identities, roles and interests that encouraged Arab leaders to adhere to the norms of sovereignty’ (Barnett, 1998: 269). The current status quo is reassuring of sovereignty despite the persistence of the Palestine–Israel problem, the uncertainty around Iraq, the external element still highly present, the problems of post-colonial resentfulness, and the separation between world society and interstate society at the regional level. Arab states have now constructed their own individual realities, and the global institution of sovereignty has implanted itself with a relative degree of success, sometimes aided and other times threatened by regional challenges.

Differences with the global level The Middle East has adapted to sovereignty with a combination of features that introduce elements of difference with the Western-led global international society: (a) Formation of the state, as briefly related above, digging a gap between interstate society and world society. (b) Role of external influences (mainly the US and Britain) in aiding the existence of several governments and political regimes. In consequence, most governments suffer from weak internal legitimacy. (c) Vulnerability to intervention, from direct interference in other states during the years of pan-Arabism, to the pervasive tendency in the region to intervene in other states’ affairs through money or propaganda. (d) The discovery of oil and the vast revenues that it brought in the postSecond World War era. This facilitated the consolidation of the state by providing both a source of influence through which many states could establish powerful external alliances and sufficient wealth to consolidate their internal power structures. (e) Role of religion – Islam: Despite its internal fragmentation, Islam has a constitutive use in Middle Eastern political life: it legitimises governments, makes them stronger in their internal and external




Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

position, and contributes to shape the region. However, Islam can also challenge the modern state, with threats from interpretations coming from radical groups. The subject of Islam in the contemporary Middle East is dealt with in detail in Chapter 8. In relation to the institutional assessments carried out in this chapter, I take the position that Islam is a feature in the regional interpretation of the institution of sovereignty in the Middle East, but not an institution in itself (neither master nor derivative). Islam does not acquire the constitutive dimension that institutions have in the making of interstate relations due mainly to two reasons: most states in the Middle East are officially secular, and even if they are not, at interstate level Islam is mainly rhetoric. The OIC (see Chapter 6) is a good example of this rhetorical angle. To conclude, the distinctiveness of sovereignty in the Middle East highlighted in this chapter echoes the discussions in Chapters 1 and 9. In Chapter 1 Halliday talks about ‘the low salience of sovereignty’ and documents the predisposition of Middle Eastern states to intervene in each other’s internal affairs in a greater degree than in any other part of the world. In Chapter 9 Hinnebusch notes a regional lack of congruency between the state and the nation in combination with the presence of supra-state identities, and how that affects the institution of sovereignty. He explains the relative solidness of sovereignty as a defence against stronger states in contrast with its weakness in regards to the internalisation of the principles of non-intervention. Finally, it is the mission of this chapter to conclude where sovereignty stands in the institutional assessment: the institution of sovereignty in the Middle East does present significant regional specificities that differentiate the region from the global level, but no new regional institutional derivatives have been identified.

2 Diplomacy Presence and interpretation of diplomacy in the Middle East Diplomacy is the institution of the society of states concerned with dialogue and negotiation among states, designed to identify common interests among the parties and solve possible areas of conflict. Chapter 4 has offered an innovative insight into the formation of this institution, with Europeans and Ottomans working closely together in the modern interpretation of diplomacy in the society of states. Chapter 4 explained



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how subsequently the Ottoman Empire acted as a transmission belt in the diffusion of this institution to the Middle East. The interpretation of diplomacy in the Middle East has varied according to historical circumstances. Its failures and achievements have contributed to today’s standing of the Middle East. Various turning points in which diplomacy was a crucial instrument for the region can be specifically singled out: • The formation of the current borders, mainly Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,

Palestine, Israel and Jordan. • The years of Arab nationalism: The institution of diplomacy in the

Middle East was perhaps at its strongest during the years of Arab nationalism. Despite all the tensions and differences, it stopped the Arab countries from going to war with each other. Diplomacy was the main tool permitted at Arab interstate level. Paradoxically, diplomacy constituted the ground where interstate rivalries started to grow until tensions among Arab states created an unsustainable spiral of discord that exploded in the run-up to the 1990 Gulf War. As Chapter 7 discusses in depth, Arab nationalism was used on diplomatic grounds to nurture the aspirations of regional control by several countries and heads of government, as well as the competition for establishing regional leaders. • The formation of the Arab League and the tradition of mediation and summits that it brought to the region (see Chapter 6). • The 1990 Gulf War: A series of failed inter-Arab diplomatic attempts led to what constituted the most radical shake-up of the politics within the region, as well as between the region and outside powers. Differences with the global level The institution of diplomacy, together with its derivatives of bilateralism and multilateralism, does not present any recognisable differences with the global level. It is a very active institution in the Middle Eastern interstate domain, with some regional variations on its usage as documented above. Since the First World War until the 1990 Gulf War, the relevance of this institution has been arguably bigger than in other regions of the world. The years of Arab nationalism saw diplomacy constraining other institutions (mainly war within the Arab core) and shaking others (mainly sovereignty and non-intervention). Diplomacy has been used on a double-track strategy that combined internal regional interstate channels with external interactions between the states of the region and foreign powers.




Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

The Cold War was a very active time for this institution on the regional international front, with both superpowers competing to gain allies in the region. The intensification in the regional international usage of this institution proliferated also as more oil was discovered and the Gulf countries became central to the economic interests of the core of international society. Since the 1990 Gulf War and the weakening of Arab nationalism at the interstate level, together with the rise of terrorism, the focus of diplomacy has now shifted back into the regional international realm, particularly with the United States heading the relationship. In conclusion, the institution of diplomacy is fully in tune with its global understanding in international society, including the derivatives. The differences appreciated here are a matter of the usage of the institution, where unusual degrees of relevance have been documented. Particularly distinctive are the impact of diplomacy on map drawing, the years of Arab nationalism and the international economic interests in the region’s oil.

3 Territoriality Presence and interpretation of territoriality in the Middle East Territoriality in modern international society is the institution embodying the principle that politics is to be organised on a territorial basis. In the Middle East there is a general acceptance of this global institution, not only in its current post-colonial shape but also with reminiscences traceable to the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 3 has documented how the Ottoman Empire was not a monolithic identity but a collage of regions defining their own interests within the wider framework of the Empire. Since the end of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the state system, territoriality has confronted various challenges in its trajectory until consolidating itself as a respected institution in the region. This institution has been violated mainly by the invasion of Kuwait and the Israel–Palestine issue. The invasion of Kuwait affected several institutions to different degrees: sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, war and great power management. Saddam’s territorial ambitions and plans to extend the borders of Iraq were matters of territoriality. The reaction of both Kuwait’s neighbours and the international community was unified and uncompromising in defending the institution of territoriality and the boundaries of Kuwait. There are no differences here with the global interpretation of this institution (especially when under threat).



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A different case is the Israel–Palestine problem, and in the next subsection I will look into the defining features that it brings to the Middle Eastern interstate domain. The Israel–Palestine issue is constructed entirely in and around the institution of territoriality, from the creation of Israel in 1948 to the different solutions that have been put forward in the ups and downs of the negotiations over the years: a full Palestinian state, an all-Israel state or a two-state solution in which the territory is divided. The fact that Israel seems to be ‘exempt’ from the international norm regarding the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force also falls into the realm of territoriality.

Differences with the global level The elements of territoriality, and particularly the derivative institution of boundaries, just mentioned, already mark a difference with the global level. They have also another key feature: conflict. In fact, conflict in the Israel–Palestine case has now been linked to territoriality at both state and non-state level for decades. It has involved not only Israel and Palestine, but also their neighbours: Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan directly, and the rest of the Arab countries indirectly, who have openly supported the Palestinian cause, some of them despite their alignments with the US. The involvement of other Arab countries in the conflict has not always been uncritical of the Palestinians, but despite those crises, the general sentiment in the region towards sympathising with the Palestinian predicament is very strong. The Israel–Palestine conflict has made the internal interstate connections in the Middle East region stronger. Even the non-Arab core has tended to sympathise with the Palestinian cause, either to draw itself as an intermediary looking for a useful position in the region (the case of Turkey), or looking for wider support from the Arab core by using anti-Israel rhetoric (the case of Iran). Probably no other conflict in the post-Cold War world has had such an enormous impact on both shaping the internal dynamics of a region, and its relations with the rest of international society, especially due to its link with US internal affairs and political lobbying. This conflict, I argue, acquires in this region the status of institution and, in particular, of a derivative of the master institution of territoriality. ‘Conflict’ in the Israel–Palestine context means sustained rivalry and political pressure. Contrary to war, conflict in this sense is a condition provoked by parties who pursue incompatible goals and consists of sustained action that does not obtain an immediate result, but




does shape political and social positions. Therefore, by introducing conflict as a derivative institution here, I do not only mean a particular understanding of the term, but the Israel–Palestine problem in particular. Although it can be argued that there have been more conflicts in the Middle Eastern region, none have the features and the wide repercussions on the area that the Israel–Palestine one does, bringing the Arab and non-Arab side into play. I am aware that making the Israel–Palestine conflict an institution in itself brings strong controversy and throws questions back into the theoretical global mainstream of the English school. The most immediate challenging consequence of this would be to question whether the Cold War is an institution (see Chapter 10). This will be a question left open here for the wider English school dialogue to answer. However, at a sub-global level, I argue, a particular conflict can be an institution in itself given the enormous constitutive impact that it brings to a specific area.

4 Great power management Presence and interpretation of great power management in the Middle East This institution looks at the special responsibilities that the great powers have, given their resources and interests, to manage the system. In this kind of global/regional exercise we find two areas of analysis: great power management from global to regional level, and regional great power management within the region. The global to regional side of the equation is very active in the Middle East, with both sides interested in each other, creating a double-track use of this institution: ‘outside supply push’ and ‘local demand pull’. From the ‘outside supply push’ perspective, the history of the Middle East during the twentieth century was strongly defined by great power management, as documented in Chapter 1. The unpredictable resolution of the chaos in Iraq will have a defining impact on the future of the ‘outside supply push’ usage of the institution of great power management in the Middle East. At the moment it remains strong. There is, however, an underlying phenomenon slowly changing these dynamics: the silent increase of Chinese presence in the Middle East, whose policy is to establish strong regional allies without upsetting the United States, but with a different and more comfortable approach, uninterested in issues of democracy and human rights (EB, 2006: 1–2; IAGS, 2003: 1–3). The growing economic power of China and its anxiety to



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secure its oil supply will eventually give way to an undetermined shift in both the ‘outside supply push’ and the ‘local demand pull’ channels in the region. The usage that the Middle Eastern governments have made of great power management either actively encouraging it or conniving at it has also created a strong ‘local demand pull’ channel. In fact, this side of the relationship is more important than the ‘outside supply push’ because it suggests local acquiescence in the global institution. There has been, at different times, a clear need and even requests to mediate in conflicts that the powers of the region could not find a regional solution for. The most significant example of this is the 1990 Gulf War, where the regional governments, confused by the sunset of Arab nationalism, could not bring together a plan of action under the Arab League despite overwhelmingly condemning the actions of Iraq. Governments like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, that had previously denied any access to US troops in their territories, were now opening the doors to a permanent American presence in their countries. The general support for US intervention was widespread, coming from unlikely countries in today’s status quo, such as Syria. Egypt also offered its blessing. By the same token, the Israel–Palestine conflict has seen elements where the ‘local demand pull’ channel of great power management was called in. Generally speaking the post-Cold War era in the region has encouraged, in the interstate domain, the maintenance of the US’s position as the major ‘peace broker’ that it had gained in 1979 with the Camp David Accords when Israel signed a formal peace treaty with Egypt (Abu-Nimer and Sharoni, 2004: 183). The presence of great power management, in both its ‘outside supply push’ and ‘local demand pull’ facets, has created different reactions in the Middle East. At state level, it nurtures a love–hate relationship that seems to be welcomed by the region on the whole, although with individual country variations depending on the historical moment. At the world society level, however, it seems to produce more discomfort and unrest than stability. The intensified American presence after the 1990 Gulf War has fired strong militant opposition and terrorism, with domestic, regional and international repercussions. The region often accepts or demands outside management, but it resents and resists hegemony. Differences with the global level The Middle East has joined the global institution of great power management by establishing the ‘outside supply push’ and ‘local demand pull’ channels of interaction. In fact, the region has integrated itself




in the global dynamics of this institution through those two channels, and failed to create its own regional power. In order to analyse why the Middle East has not developed its own regional version of great power management, two elements must be observed: one, the intensity of the relationship of the region with the global institution of great power management, and two, the regional attitude towards an inside great power. As for the first factor, it has been in the interest of the global great powers to create a channel of dependency from the Middle East and, to a degree, actively block the rise of a regional power. This links with a theory brought forward by Ian Lustick, and already mentioned in Buzan’s chapter. Lustick builds his argument on the theory that European state-building has had a crucial element of ‘war making states’ and ‘states making wars’ necessary for elevating some European states into the great power club. However, the Middle East, Lustick argues, has been prevented from using the military route to great power status by the network of legal, strategic and political barriers put in place by the strongest players of the international system (Lustick, 1997: 653). This creates a vicious circle of weakness and dependency, because the lack of a great power makes the region more vulnerable to external intervention. Conversely, it can be argued that the failure to bring into existence a regional power was not only due to the global powers, but to the internal attitude in the region towards a Middle Eastern great power. The Ottoman Empire, as shown in Chapters 3 and 4, united much of the region as a great power, and since its fall the Middle East has not lacked candidates for this status, from the years of Arab nationalism headed by Egypt, to Iraq’s or Iran’s attempts, to mention the most prominent examples. A close look at Arab nationalism (provided in Chapter 7) explains the internal tensions and refusal to confer a privileged regional status to a particular neighbour. The influential countries of the Gulf have actively disliked the idea of a more powerful neighbour and looked for tighter links with outside powers, limiting that way their own capacity to achieve regional great power status themselves. Anti-hegemonism at the regional level thus works to maintain great power management from the global level. This points to a significant theoretical difference between the regional and global level in the English school discussion on institutions: while at the global level a great power is welcome and necessary, at the regional level this encounters bigger challenges, and in the Middle East in particular it has proven to be an idea wanted only by aspirant powers and not at all by the regional interstate society as a whole.




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To conclude, no major differences can be pointed out in this institution at the regional Middle Eastern level, with the global derivatives of balance of power and alliances being fully adopted. No regional institutional derivatives have been added, and the remaining global derivative of this institution in Buzan’s list, war, has been moved to a regional master institution. The next section explains this move.

5 War Presence and interpretation of war in the Middle East As defined by Bull (1995: 178), war is ‘organised violence carried out by political units against each other’, and forms an institution in the sense that it is ‘a settled pattern of behaviour, shaped towards the promotion of common goals’. War as an institution is about the range of reasons for going to war considered as legitimate, and therefore it is a more general institution than the interpretation of ‘conflict’ added earlier to the institution of territoriality. War can appear in connection with a pre-existing conflict, as it has done frequently in the Israeli–Arab case, but it can also be caused by different reasons, such as economic, strategic or security objectives. There are two levels to the institution of war: the regional one, with war as an institution within the Middle East, and the global one, with war as an institution of the global international society applied to the Middle East. Sometimes both levels overlap, such as the Iran–Iraq War and the 1990 Gulf War. In both cases there is much debate about the genuine interests of the great powers when deciding to intervene and the opportunities they saw by becoming involved in the wars, as well as the extent to which they were responsible for manipulating the situation. However, both wars started with regional reasons, and the decision to go to war hinged on the regional leaders. The 1990 Gulf War is particularly significant here, because it meant for the first time an Arab country fighting against another Arab country, and, by extension, the Arab world divided. Arab states failed to find a regional solution to Kuwait’s invasion and unanimously turned towards the United States for help. Interstate Arabism was the major casualty of this war, which many Arab countries saw as a relief from years of regional squabbles and the opportunity to follow their own goals and establish alliances that were once taboo. This shake-up of Arab nationalism, however, did not occur without dramatic long-term consequences for the region and a radical change in Arab politics (including a generalised




acceptance at state level of Israel), regional loyalties, and alliances with outside powers. Things took a crucial turn for the Middle East when the US launched the ‘global war on terrorism’ (GWoT) following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in New York. It is a new concept of war that puts the Middle East at its epicentre. Direct recipients of military action have been Afghanistan and Iraq, while uncertainty hangs over Syria and Iran. The wars related to the GWoT have a tangible impact in shaping the Middle East region, while they do not alter the whole of international society as such. The GWoT and its consequences (such as the Iraq War) are largely an external imposition. It is the use of war as a global institution of international society with direct implications for the Middle East. The other side of this is that al Qaeda, an organisation or network centred in (but not confined to) the Middle East has clearly declared war on both the West and many of the local regimes. This adds a twist to the institution, moving it from being exclusively in the interstate domain to being between the interstate domain and the transnational one.

Differences with the global level Buzan has dropped war as a master institution of the contemporary international society and placed it as a derivative of great power management (Buzan, 2004: 187). However, war remains a vigorous institution in the Middle East on two levels: internally (with wars over internal issues, even if supported by external powers such as the Iran–Iraq case), and externally, with direct action from outside, such as the latest Iraq war. There is a strong case in the Middle East to place war back onto the master institutions list, along the lines initially established by Bull. The vigorous character of this institution in the Middle East is proven by the series of wars around the Israel/Palestine–Arab problem, as well as the other regional crises provoked by disputes of economic and hegemonic interests. I base the case for placing war back onto the master institutions list in the Middle Eastern region, not only on the historical account of the past decades, but also on a point brought up by Bull in his analysis of the institution of war. When discussing the political role of this institution, he talks about ‘war and the threat of war’ (Bull, 1995: 184). In the Middle East it is not only war as in the wars that have taken place that make this institution highly active, but also the threat of war itself. Given the uncertainties about the majority of the existing political systems, the ideological and ethnic divisions in the region, territorial disputes, the effect of terrorism and the external intervention, the




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Israel–Palestine conflict, the chaos in Iraq and the decline of Arab nationalism at state level, there is an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about a next war being possible somewhere. I argue for the return of war back into the master institutions list and not as a derivative of candidates such as territoriality, because the variety of the wars in the Middle East responds to several issues, not just border disputes: national interest and regional hegemony, economic ambitions, ethnic rivalries, religious and political struggle between Sunni and Shi‘i, and recently security matters directly related to terrorism. In the Middle East both practice and the continuous threat of war indicate that the range of legitimate reasons to go to war is wider than in the global interstate society where the tendency is for the right to war to be increasingly constrained to self-defence and, up to a point, to humanitarian intervention. The GWoT has widened the legitimacy of war at the global level, at least for the US, but much of the impact of this registers in the Middle East. In conclusion, the main reasons to put war back into the main institutions list are: • War is very active even if National Arabism prevented it from being

used at interstate level for several decades within the Arab core. • The one war (1990) that broke this pact was enough to shift completely

the future of the region. • The sense that another war at any time is possible. • The external interventions on the region around the institution of

war, from direct support with regional wars, to the Cold War years when the Middle East was attractive to the great powers fighting for allies. The most recent and dramatic turn on the external use of war in the region is the GWoT, with al Qaeda’s war going in the other direction.

6 Nationalism Presence and interpretation of nationalism in the Middle East Nationalism is a key institution of international society because the nation-state remains the basic political unit that defines the actors of the society of states. The definitions for nationalism are, however, highly contested and discussed across a large spectrum of literature. The two general ideas within nationalism to keep in mind here are that nationalism can be both an ideology and a sentiment. As an ideology it identifies




a behavioural entity called ‘nation’ and pursues political goals on its behalf, such as self-determination. As a sentiment, nationalism means the loyalty towards the nation shared by people (Mayall, 1990: 35–49; Evans and Newnham, 1998: 346). The Middle Eastern interpretation of nationalism is anchored in a distinction in Arabic between two concepts: qawmiyya, which relates to the word qawm for peoples, and wataniyya, which comes from watan, the homeland. The former is linked to Arab nationalism and the latter to more localised forms of nationalism, such as Syrian, Lebanese or Saudi Arabian. Particularly significant in the interstate Middle Eastern society are the two stateless nations, Palestinians and Kurds, that represent major regional conflict flashpoints. As seen in the Ottoman Empire chapters of this book, the Ottomans brought into the Middle East the concept of nationalism though their Ottomanism, an introduction that turned against them with the rise of its counterpart Arab nationalism. To begin with, Arab nationalism entered the political discourse in the 1900s as a reaction to the Turkification programme that the Ottoman Empire proceeded to carry out in the Fertile Crescent. With the intervention of Britain, it soon intensified its tone from a defence of Arab language, culture and the relative autonomy of Arab lands within the Ottoman Empire, to a decisive tool in the break-up of the Empire. The historical evolution of Arab nationalism in the following decades saw it grow into the terrains of sovereignty and statehood linked to claims for political independence from the new Western influences that had replaced the Ottoman Empire, to the Palestine cause and to the constraints of an interstate Arab loyalty. The trajectory of Arab nationalism is explained in detail in Chapter 7. It is relevant here as a regional variant of the global understanding of nationalism and, for the purposes of this chapter, a derivative institution of nationalism in the Middle Eastern interstate society. The strongest argument in favour of including Arab nationalism as a regional institution at state level is that unlike in most other parts of the world Arab nationalism is as much located across a large group of states as it is within each of them. For this reason, it is strongly connected with the previous institution of war and the fact that the states of the Arab core refrained from going to war with each other until the 1990 Gulf War. Because of this unusual transnational quality Arab nationalism shares the constitutive feature of institutions and has a spill-over effect on the regional interpretation of other institutions in addition to war, such as sovereignty, diplomacy and territoriality.





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The institution of nationalism is packed with regional distinctiveness through the institutional derivative of Arab nationalism. The global derivatives of self-determination, popular sovereignty and democracy are not present in their literal interpretation. Glimpses of them, however, can be detected across the region, and the degree in which they do that varies according to the country. For example, the Arabian dynasties have different forms of accountability to their populations and therefore consultation with their citizens. While their political efficiency and impact is questionable, in terms of the institution it is their mere existence that counts as a derivative of nationalism along the lines of basic expressions of popular sovereignty. In other cases, such as Iran or Lebanon, popular sovereignty and democracy (at least in its interpretation of the right to vote and elect a government or sections of a government) are present, although with their own understandings. Efforts have been made in the past few years across the Middle East to incorporate changes along the lines of democratic reforms, although still in a different framework to the one understood as an institution of international society, and still mainly within the regional framework of dynasticism and patrimonialism. Finally, and again because of the transnational quality of Arab nationalism, the global derivative of self-determination finds a regional presence when nationalism is understood as a sentiment of loyalty towards the state shared by the people (provided by such factors as language, religion, shared history …). Regardless of the background of these countries in their formation from colonialism to revolution (see Chapter 1), over time most of them made their own realities with a degree of nationalist identification with the state in which they are contained, and that includes the state apparatus even if based on dynasticism and patrimonialism.

7 Equality of people Presence and interpretation of equality of people in the Middle East Equality of people is a wide-ranging concept represented at the institutional level of international society by human rights and humanitarian intervention, both controversial subjects due to their potential interference with key institutions such as sovereignty. Their institutional status in global international society is still contested. At the heart of this institution in the Middle East is the question of where Islamic ethics stand, and the debate about the differences between



Differences with the global level

the liberal discourse and the Islamic discourse on issues such as individualism and collectivism, or the source of rights, whether the individual or God. Even if, in principle, Islam calls for equality of people, the internal differences among Muslims on the interpretation of these concepts are large. Particularly controversial within this institution are the position of women, the discrimination against non-believers and, in some countries, the unequal treatment of Shi‘i or Sunni Muslims depending on the ruling majority. In terms of the presence and interpretation of this institution in the Middle East, and despite the debate and the reservations applied, most countries in the region are signatories to the main international human rights instruments. Either through external pressure or through their own initiative, those signatures symbolise the adhesion of the region to the language of international society and, therefore, to the derivative institution of human rights. This is despite the poor human rights record in some countries. The derivative institution of humanitarian intervention is also present, although it must be acknowledged that this institution is much more complex than the general statement that I limit my argument to in this chapter. As in most institutions in this list, humanitarian intervention displays a double-track approach, with the usage of the institution both as a regional tool, and as a ground for interaction between the region and international society. In the first case it could be argued that the role that several Arab states have taken at times to help Palestine directly could be humanitarian intervention. Either through Arab nationalism or other principles, Middle East countries have tended to favour directly or indirectly outside intervention on these matters. This could be because they are constrained by their relationship with outside powers across other institutions or because they cannot agree on a unified plan of action, such as in the crisis of the Kuwaiti invasion. In the second case, the latest war on Iraq could controversially be read as humanitarian intervention of outside powers against an oppressive leader, to mention an example.

Differences with the global level The key difference with the global level comes through an additional regional derivative institution: ruling elites. It qualifies institutionally under ‘equality of people’ as a counter-derivative, meaning that is in many ways contradictory to the global understanding of the master institution. Variations of ‘ruling elites’ as an interstate institution have




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already been listed before in English school literature: Wight (1977: 111–12) talks about ‘dynastic principles’ and Buzan (2004: 184) tellingly introduces dynasticism as a derivative institution of ‘inequality of people’. I use here the wider term ‘ruling elites’ to mean the institution that relates to the group that holds a disproportionate amount of power and political influence. It differs from the global level, where the interpretation of this institution only legitimises a ‘governing elite’ if it has been directly chosen by the citizens and with accountability to the institutions that protect the interests of the electorate. The Middle East thus suffers from a tension between an adherence to equality of people that accords with the global level, and a regional practice of ruling elites. Ruling elites are not exclusive to the Middle East and manifestations of it can be found in other regions across the global international society. As an institution, however, they present in the Middle East distinctive regional features. Ruling elites here operate under the principle of patrimonialism, which is the term often used to explain the institutional composition of Middle East governments, and acquires other variants such as neo-patrimonialism, patriarchism, patronage or rentier states. In a general view, and at the risk of reductionism, their common denominator is the idea that the ruler organises the political system around himself. The characteristics of patrimonialism differ in a republic or a monarchy, but the main patterns of patrimonialism seem to be present across the modern Middle East and rooted in a historical trajectory of a type of leadership that have been kept across the centuries. Bill and Springborg (1999: 119–29) identify six features across the Middle East patrimonialist political structures: personalism, proximity to the leader, informality, balanced conflict, military prowess and religious rationalisation. While features of patrimonialism are common to other parts of the world, specific conditions, development and experiences belonging to the Middle East during the merger of colonialism and the existing patriarchal traditional society can be identified as unique to the region (Sharabi, 1988: 15–23). Patrimonialism, in its patron–client angle, does not occur only inside the countries – meaning the relationship of the citizens with their government, but within the region itself, especially among the oil-rich countries and the non-rich countries. Patrimonialism in the Middle East can appear (although not necessarily) under ‘dynastic principles’. As pointed out at the beginning of this section, dynastic principles have been treated before in the literature as an institution. I include them here, however, as a feature of the wider institution of ruling elites. In a broad sense of the term, they encompass a great array of features and variations. At one end, the obvious candidates




are the monarchic regimes, while at the other it can be argued that some non-monarchic regimes also operate under dynasticism in the sense that the family retains political power for more than one generation (Syria, possibly Egypt with Mubarak’s son in line to follow his father if the plan succeeds, or what would have happened in Iraq had Saddam Hussein remained in power). Dynastic principles are certainly a key feature of monarchic regimes, and in the Middle East they present features of their own. Herb (1999) calls this combination of monarchism and dynasticism ‘dynastic monarchies’, where the family at large spreads itself across the highest state offices, the ministries and other key positions in the country (such as governors of main cities), controlling the newly powerful bureaucratic states of the oil era. Oil is an essential ingredient in the formation of these ruling institutions for two reasons: one, it allowed the rapid transformation of these countries into a modern state apparatus, and two, because it gives members of the family bargaining possibilities to help the leader reach power and reciprocally it allows the leader to stay in power by conferring positions of influence and wealth (Herb, 1999: 2–15). It combines extreme oil wealth with a sophisticated, almost impenetrable, family distribution of power across the state. The regional relevance of this institution is also presented by the fact that it spreads across the wealthiest countries, whose oil the rest of the world is dependent on, shaping a great deal of the internal and external politics of the region.

8 The market Presence and interpretation of the market in the Middle East The institution of the market is the social structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods and services on the basis of a price negotiated between them and reflecting the interplay of supply and demand. At the international society level it is associated with liberalisation and regulated mainly by the WTO. There is a clear presence of this global institution in the Middle East, both in the search of regional interpretations through internal interstate trade associations, and in the interest in establishing links with the global players. These links include bilateral agreements between an Arab country and another country outside the region usually involving oil, and agreements between individual countries and bigger international blocs, mainly the European Union and the WTO. All of them embrace the principles of free trade.





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The region has had several plans to create its own internal bloc in an attempt to strengthen the regional ties, support the economy of the countries involved and compete in a unified manner in the global economy. After several failed projects, 18 members of the Arab League signed in 1997 the Arab Free Trade Zone Agreement that led to the creation of the Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA) in 2005. GAFTA is managed by the Council of Ministers of member countries and its secretariat works under the economics department of the Arab League. The association has so far achieved major reductions in trade tariffs among its members, although it faces challenges that threaten its long-term success, such as a large list of exceptions for tariff removal and other taxes, and charges with similar effects to tariffs (Khasawneh, 2000: 1–5; MEES, 2002: 1–4). The Middle East in the global trade structures Two major international players intervene in the connection between the Middle East and the global understanding of the institution of trade: the EU and the WTO. Most Arab countries are now members of the WTO or are in the process of becoming so, which is self-explanatory on the region’s attitude to the global institution of the market. The EU is also a key player in the area, which seems to attract more attention from the Arab counterparts than the strengthening of their own inter-Arab association. The EU has two major projects in the region: the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership engaging Israel as well as all the Arab-Mediterranean countries, and the EU-GCC project involving the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The differences between the two strategies highlights, among other things, the economic disparity within the Middle East region. While the GCC countries count among the richest per capita in the world, many of the countries grouped in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership display some of the lowest. Differences with the global level The Middle East has entered the dynamics of the institution of the market, and the general trend is to adopt the institution as the global international society understands it. Oil has contributed to elevating this region into the global economy. Steps have been taken on all the fronts: internationally by forming part of the process of globalisation, not just through oil but also by joining the WTO, regionally with the project of an Arab regional bloc, and domestically by starting to apply



Inter-Arab cooperation

national reforms along the lines of liberalisation. This is not to say that the process is smooth or controversy-free, mainly characterised by tensions between liberalisation and the limits of patrimonialism, as well as by tensions between globalisation and the room for it in Middle Eastern societies. What I am registering here, however, is the attitude of the region to this global institution, and, as documented above, evidence shows that the tendency is to accept it without major differences than those brought by the restrictions of where a country is at both economically and politically. A question mark hangs on how far these regimes can liberalise while keeping themselves in power. When looking at the derivative institutions of the market in particular (trade liberalisation, financial liberalisation, hegemonic stability), the only one that shows a particular nuance with respect to the global trend is financial liberalisation, that finds itself intermingled with Islamic economic theory. Islamic economics is awash with different opinions about what they allow, and how compatible they are with capitalist principles, or where the balance is between public and private interests. Some writers even reject altogether the idea that Islamic economics exist (Halliday, 2005b: 89). In the past few years, however, the language of Islamic finance has developed substantially, and Islamic banks and financial institutions manage some US$200 billion all over the world. Islamic banking and Islamic insurance/reinsurance are current subheadings of the international economy, and have a strong standing in the global dialogue of politics and economics. Both the FTSE and Dow Jones provide indices to monitor the growing market of ‘Islamic equity’ and countries like Britain voice their interest in joining the Islamic finance trend. Therefore, this feature of the market is not unique to the Middle East region, and receptive positions in Western countries prove that it has now become a part of the global institution of the market.

9 Environmental stewardship Presence and interpretation of environmental stewardship in the Middle East This institution is growing at the global level in relation to issues associated with global warming. It is the institution in charge of looking after the future of the planet and the sustainability of the global commons. Chapter 2 has explained the recent addition of this institution to the global list, and its fragile and disputed nature even within the core of international society. The Kyoto Protocol, under the United Nations




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Framework Convention on Climate Change, is the most significant international agreement on the need to reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming and therefore climate change. The fact that the United States, second greenhouse polluter after China, has not signed the protocol reveals the fragility of this institution at the very centre of the global international society. New efforts have been launched in Bali (November 2007) where ministers of over 180 countries created a framework to negotiate a new global-warming agreement by 2009. The Middle East has made substantial progress in the past 20 years in environmental matters. Environmental laws have been adopted by several countries, and steps have been taken in signing international conventions. In fact, all the countries in the Middle East have now ratified the Kyoto Protocol (UNFCCC, 2008; Stowall, 1998: 1–5).

Differences with the global level In terms of the understanding of this institution, the regional take on the global direction is not different to the general understanding of international society. This takes also into account the fact that at the global level this is an emerging institution and the guidelines remain unclear. Although there are no substantial differences to document at the regional level in relation to the general concerns of the global institution, the Middle East, however, faces its own regional challenges with regards to environmental issues: land and coastal degradation and desertification, urban and industrial pollution, weak institutional and legal frameworks, and water scarcity and quality (World Bank, 2001: 113–16). Climate change is now increasing the pressure on the distribution of already scarce resources in the region, mainly water. It is anticipated that by 2025 around 18 countries in the Middle East will suffer from water shortages, and with rivers crossing many frontiers, this is a source of concern for a peaceful future for the region (Darwish, 1994: 1–13). The extraction of oil has helped the development of national regulations regarding environmental protection, which in countries like Kuwait have grown significantly after the damage caused by the invasion of Iraq. Other elements, such as the increasing entrance of the region into the global economic structures, from WTO ascensions to multilateral and bilateral treatments with the European Union, have promoted a political situation in the Middle East where global environmental standards need to be watched more closely as they are tied with development programmes and donors’ money. The World Bank has reported a surge




of international and regional environmental activities in the Middle East since 1990 (World Bank, 2001: 116). In conclusion, no different interpretations of this institution exist at the regional level. The Middle East is not an international leader in this institution, neither is it an obstacle. Its direction is to join the global trend.

10 List of institutions in the Middle East Returning now to the opening paragraph of this chapter, the individual analysis of the institutions has shown differences at the regional level, with respect to the global level, in key institutions and practices associated with them. In relation to the question of whether there is a difference with the global level in the sense that the Middle East shares fewer or more institutions, as well as different interpretations of the global ones, the conclusions are: (a) In terms of fewer institutions, all the master institutions exist, but not all the derivative institutions. It could even be argued that the derivative institutions of the global level are present, but with a large gap of understanding among them, especially within the institutions of nationalism and equality of people. (b) In terms of more institutions, the Middle East has significant derivative institutions not present at the contemporary global level (Israel– Palestine conflict and Arab nationalism), and a counter-derivative (ruling elites) whose position in the institutions list contradicts the global understanding. At the same time, the derivative institution of war acquires the status of master institution. (c) In terms of differences in interpretation, significant nuances were documented in most master institutions, particularly sovereignty and great power management. This is shown in Table 5.2.

11 Conclusion I conclude that the Middle East is a sub-global interstate society on the basis of the regional differences collected both in the interpretation of the global master institutions, and in the specific presence or absence at the regional level of some derivative institutions. The sharing of master institutions (even if at a ‘basic, coexistence’ level as pointed by Buzan)





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Master institutions

Derivative institutions

Sovereignty

Non-intervention International law Bilateralism Multilateralism Boundaries Conflict/Israel–Palestine Alliances Balance of power

Diplomacy Territoriality Great power management War Nationalism

Equality of people

Market


Self-determination Popular sovereignty/democracy Arab nationalism Human rights Humanitarian intervention Ruling elites Trade liberalisation Financial liberalisation Hegemonic stability Species survival Climate stability

gives a place to the Middle East in the global social structures as part of the contemporary international society. This does not mean that the absorption of the Middle East by the global international society has not been successful, but that it has kept regional features strong enough to remain as a sub-global phenomenon. This is as far as the language of the existing English school literature goes. There is, however, a theoretical twist that has appeared here when analysing each institution in relation to the so-called global pattern. By studying the Middle East as a sub-global phenomenon, what we are doing is comparing it with the Western core, what we have elsewhere identified as international community (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005). There is indeed a global basic understanding of most of those institutions that has spread successfully creating a global interstate society, but that is only elementary. If we were going to talk about institutions in their global sense, there would be more scope to establish a spectrum of strength and meaning in each institution. For example, when assessing sovereignty we would need to deduce some kind of global average calculated between



Table 5.2 Primary institutions of the Middle Eastern interstate society.

one extreme (the quasi-states of Africa) and the other (the United States or the West in general). If such calculation was done, the Middle East would come out pretty strong institutionally, because its states have survived and represent a solidness that many other countries in the world do not have. Therefore, if this institutional analysis was going to be done that way we would obtain different results of interpretation in most individual institutions, although the conclusion about the Middle East being a regional interstate society on the basis of its institutional specificities would still be the same. Chapter 10 will come back to what these conclusions mean for both the Middle East and the wider international society.




The Secondary Institutions of the Middle Eastern Regional Interstate Society Simon W. Murden

Introduction The formation of the international system in the Middle East tells the distinctive story of a regional system emerging in a post-colonial context: of newly created states acting to guard their recently gained independence and sovereignty but also torn by emerging and competing identities, including transitional ideas of community which cut across the very legitimacy of the state and state system. One of the most noticeable features of the emerging system in the Middle East was the number and apparent significance of its ‘secondary institutions’. The Arab League, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) all appeared, at one time or other, to reflect the will of states and peoples to foster common values and institutions with a view to increasing the levels of solidarity and practical cooperation among them. Yet, the ‘thickening’ of international society in the Middle East would ultimately embody a great deal of insubstantial frothing. The state elites involved in promoting these transnational values and institutions would prove unable and/or unwilling to progress them, and the aspirations of many Middle Easterners would remain unfulfilled. Indeed, as this chapter will argue, by the end of the twentieth century many of the secondary institutions of the Middle East fronted ‘dead-letter’ regimes which implied a drift towards a ‘dead-letter international society’. The way in which the secondary institutions of an international system stem from the imperatives generated by particular primary 117



6

institutions – such as sovereignty, diplomacy, nationalism, great power management and the market – and the way those secondary institutions subsequently function are indicative of the character of its international society. Understanding the development of secondary institutions may inform a much broader categorisation of international systems and international societies. In the Middle East, the discordance between the imperatives of sovereignty and nationalism would produce conflict and stymie the further development of the secondary institutions, while the dynamics of diplomacy and great power management would also often prevent such conflicts from being resolved one way or another. In order to convey the underlying dynamics effecting the functioning of secondary institutions, this chapter models the Middle East’s international system and international society in terms of two indices which reflect: (a) the level of practical integration between states ranging from political and economic independence/autarky to high levels of political and economic interdependency; (b) the level of normative collegiality in the international system ranging from the idea of self-interest to various ideas of solidarism/integrationism (see Figure 6.1).

Indices A. Interdependency Path to the Balance of Power and Anarchical Society

Path to the Security Community (Ultimately, World Community)

Secondary institutions are primarily for communication. States are reluctant to continue with co-operative behaviors if other states make relative gains.

Secondary institutions foster the pursuit of absolute gains for all in the context of progressively closer union. Concerns about other states making relative gains gradually lose their significance.

Self-Interest Indices B.

Solidarism Indices B.

The Absence of International Society

Path to the Dead-letter International Society

Secondary institutions are absent or are hierarchical/imperial in nature.

Secondary institutions reflect common aspirations, but do not lead to substantive integration. Concerns about relative gain among brethren states are only partially offset by common values.

Independence/Autarky Indices A. Figure 6.1 Understanding the character of international society as indicated by the secondary institutions of the international system (by interpretative analysis).



118 Simon W. Murden

Secondary Institutions of Regional Interstate Society

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1 The modern international system in the Middle East The international system of the Middle East grew up not only in the shadow of colonialism, but amid the tremendous changes brought by modernisation. The system emerged at the end of the First World War from the final contraction of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of new structures by Britain and France. While the new order embodied traces of existing practice and the influence of local political forces, as Nuri Yurdusev describes in Chapter 4 of this volume, the establishment of discrete territorial sovereignties in the region was substantially an import from Europe. The regional order fostered by the Ottoman Empire – which had embodied the overlapping entities of the caliphate, the central state, devolved provincial governorships, and local tribal and religious authorities – was superseded by centralised territorial bodies which set about forging a single national identity and coercing compliance to it. Alternative communities might exist in the realm of interhuman relations at both sub-national and transnational levels, but they were not formally recognised as actors in the state system which was imposed. Thus, as the Arab peoples were broken up into various states, references to transnational religious or ethnic identifications were subsumed into the discrete territorial community. But, the Arab state would struggle to consolidate its monopoly over power and authority in the face of alternative communities, and many suffered a prolonged legitimacy deficit. The problem was most severe for the states of the Levant which were created and controlled by Britain and France: Britain dominated Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq, and France did the same in Lebanon and Syria. While some attention was paid to patterns of geography and demography, as well as the old Ottoman provincial system, it is scarcely surprising that states created by the pencil and ruler of a Colonial Office official might be regarded with scepticism. The Levant is a patchwork of religious and ethnic minorities, and sub-national solidarity groups soon found themselves subject to closer supervision from some new national capital. Meanwhile, those who aspired to identify with broader religious or ethnic brethren were faced with new barriers. The legitimacy problem was all the more acute because those elites which had been bequeathed the new states owed



The model may be useful with respect to an English school analysis, especially in mapping the presence of solidarist values in international society and their significance as manifest in the secondary institutions of the international system.

their position to Britain and France. The links to the colonial powers were unpopular enough, but since most of the new rulers were drawn from traditional ruling groups they also ran into realities of modernisation. Modern systems of education and employment were producing cadres of thinking men who not only rejected the authority of traditional elites but were not averse to questioning the whole structure of the state system imposed by the Europeans. Above all, the traditional elites ran into a new class of army officers who were inspired by Arab nationalism. The legitimacy crisis became acute by the 1950s and 1960s, manifesting itself most clearly with the coup d’état in Egypt in 1952 led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. Initially, Nasser’s ideology was vague, but he eventually articulated a vision which mixed anti-colonialism/imperialism, anti-Zionism, pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. Nasser’s vision was revolutionary on a number of levels, but it was the pan-Arab spin which most challenged the new state system. Pan-Arabism struck a chord across the Middle East region, especially in the Levant, with real questions being raised about the continued existence of borders which, it was argued, were colonial impositions designed to divide Arabs and prevent them from fulfilling their historic potential. Egypt’s natural size and prestige within the Arab world bolstered Nasser’s ideological appeal. Moreover, following Nasser’s implacable resistance to the disastrous British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, he became a truly iconic figure across the Arab world. The Middle East was set for a decade of contestation over the legitimacy of the state and the ‘requirement’ for pan-Arab institution-building. The ferment was further sharpened by nationalist military coups in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The tension between statehood and pan-Arab nationalism would reach its ultimate expression in the astonishing union between Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961. The creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) stemmed from domestic political manoeuvring in Syria – an attempt by Nasserist and Ba’thist nationalists to prevent the Democratic Bloc led by Khalid al-Azm (who was sympathetic to the Communist Party) winning forthcoming elections – but it also reflected a deep, if emotional and inchoate, desire to reject the divisive structures imposed by the Europeans (Sluglett and Farouk–Sluglett, 1993: 258–9). But, the way that the secret and unofficial 14-man Syrian delegation went to Cairo to subvert the existence of the Syrian state – conducting and concluding union negotiations in little more than two weeks – was hardly the recipe for a successful merger. Syrians were swept along in a moment of enthusiasm, and Syria was effectively hijacked. The UAR was an Egyptian takeover, and it was not long before too many Syrians had become bitterly



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disappointed by the outcome. Few Syrians had any real desire or interest to be subsumed by the authoritarian Egyptian state. Following a military coup in 1961 which brought more traditionalist leadership back to power, Syria seceded from the union. The collapse of the UAR was an important moment of failure for panArab nationalism, and although Egypt, Syria, Iraq and others continued to talk about mergers throughout the 1960s it looked increasingly less likely that the solidarist idea would come to fruition in such a way again. In fact, while the Arab states continued to suffer from a legitimacy deficit, they would gradually begin to consolidate their own realities. They built up their own bureaucracies and armies, as well as the physical infrastructure – the roads, ports, public utilities, schools, hospitals, and factories – of national life. By the 1970–80s, few could imagine a Middle East without the territorial states bequeathed by Europeans.

2 The Arab League If the territorial state proved more seductive and resilient than pan-Arab nationalists expected, Arab nationalism continued to have real energy for some years to come. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the idea manifested itself at the level of international society, especially in the institution of the Arab League. The Arab League itself grew out of a British attempt to court popularity in the Arab world during the Second World War. Fearing German incursions in 1942, the British publicly backed the idea of Arab unity, and went on to convene an Arab conference in Alexandria in September–October 1944 attended by Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, North Yemen and Saudi Arabia, as well as by Palestinian observers. The meeting resolved to form the League of Arab States, and this was formally inaugurated at a conference in Cairo on 22 March 1945. The Arabs themselves perceived that such an organisation might not only generally help to consolidate their distinctiveness and claim for self-determination and independence, but also deal with the looming possibilities of a post-war French return to Lebanon and Syria and an Arab–Jewish conflict in Palestine (Tripp, 1995: 287). As more Arab states emerged from colonial tutelage, the membership of the organisation grew: Libya joined in 1953; Sudan in 1956; Morocco and Tunisia in 1958; Kuwait in 1961; Algeria in 1962; South Yemen in 1967; Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971; Mauritania in 1973; Somalia in 1974; Djibouti in 1977; and the Comoros in 1993. In addition, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was recognised




as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people at the Arab League summit in Rabat in 1974, and became full member in 1976. The League was an intergovernmental alliance, principally designed to promote consensual cooperation between its members for their individual and mutual benefit. Crucially, the sovereignty of the member states was fully recognised. Article 8 of the Charter of the Arab League noted that: Each member state shall respect the systems of government established in the other member states and regard them as exclusive concerns of those states. Each shall pledge to abstain from any action calculated to change established systems of government. (Charter of the Arab League, 1945) Article 9 also noted that while member states were free to develop closer ties among themselves than was provided for in the Charter, such agreements should be strictly consensual and were non-binding upon any other members. As an intergovernmental alliance, the institutions of the Arab League appeared well developed. The League was centred on a permanent headquarters in Cairo, and it supported a number of subsidiary organisations such as an Arab postal union. The summits of the heads of state became major events in the political calendar of the region, and the organisation also serviced the work of 11 ongoing ministerial councils and 17 specialised technical committees. The ministerial councils met regularly to discuss matters of common interest, including matters of policy and regulatory harmonisation. Such harmonisation work continues to this day, although the Arab world remains far away from developing anything like a common market. While Arab states had embarked on a path in which they articulated a solidarist idea, for the traditional elites which ruled over many of the states during the early years of the League’s existence, solidarism was very much tempered by dynastic and parochial interests. Notwithstanding the work of the ministerial councils and subsidiary organisations, the actual levels of political and economic integration across the Arab world remained modest (see Figure 6.2). Above all, Arab economies were either completely undeveloped, orientated towards external markets (especially the West) or run along the lines of some sort of socialist autarky. It was not until the development of the oil-capital-labour economy in the Middle East in the 1970s – linking the oil-rich Gulf states and North African states to capital-poor labour providers such as Egypt, Sudan, Yemen and



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Interdependency

Territorial states established by European powers. Arab League created in 1945.

Path to the Security Community

R‘evolutionary’ Arab states promote the pan-Arab idea. Solidarist values are manifest in higher levels of integration for brief periods (as with the UAR).

The effect of the Iraq Wars of 1991 and 2003-

Self-Interest

Solidarism The failure of the UAR, and the proliferation of inter-state conflicts in the 1960–70s does not dampen the idea of integration, but the practice.

The fragmentation of Arab international society as reflected in the creation of sub-regional secondary institutions, such as the GCC, ACC, and AMU.

The Absence of International Society

Independence/Autarky

The potential effect of the pan-Islamic idea, as manifest in the OIC.

Path to the Dead-Letter International Society

Figure 6.2 The development of international society in the Middle East as indicated by the progress of its secondary institutions (by interpretative analysis).

Syria – that significant integration took place, although the dynamics of this economy did little to bolster the solidarist idea. The small and rich ‘rentier states’ of the Gulf had little incentive to give up their autonomy. Moreover, to the extent that Arabs traded, it largely involved transhipping other people’s goods. Arab countries continued to do very little trade with each other. In sum, even if solidarist values had enjoyed a significant degree of consensus, the Arab idea was not backed by the economic interests and structures which could have made the cultural preference and political idea more solid. Where the Arab League did have more significance was in the realm of security relations. The Charter of the Arab League clearly recognised the independence of the member states, and despite the proselytising of Arab nationalist leaders like Nasser, the settled consensus was that the smaller states must not be picked off by the bigger states. Article 5 of the Charter made it clear that: Any resort to force in order to resolve disputes between two or more member states of the League is prohibited. If there should arise among them a difference which does not concern a state’s independence, sovereignty, or territorial integrity, and if the parties to



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the dispute have recourse to the Council for the settlement of this difference, the decision of the Council shall then be enforceable and obligatory . . . The Council shall mediate in all differences which threaten to lead to war between two member states, or a member state and a third-state, with a view to bringing about their reconciliation. (Charter of the Arab League, 1945) Article 6 went on to give any member state the right to call for an immediate convocation of the Council if it faced an aggression or threat of aggression, although it would require a unanimous decision (excluding the alleged aggressor’s vote) to determine ‘the necessary measures to repulse the aggression’; thus, while the Council was always likely to come down on the side of the victim of any aggression, the bar to a collective security response was very high. Nevertheless, the norm was that all Arabs were brethren and that the Arab international system should not be a competitive one: balance of power-type behaviour, much less threats to sovereignty of members, was not needed nor justified. A key test of this norm would come in 1961 following Kuwait’s formal independence from Britain, when the country promptly came under threat from the Iraqi regime of Abd al-Karim Qassim. Arab nationalists in Iraq were inclined to regard Kuwait as an imperial-age anachronism, designed to keep Iraq down and divide the Arabs. With British forces initially holding the ring by virtue of a preventive intervention, the Arab League subsequently came to the rescue. The League backed the sovereignty of its new member, and later dispatched a force to solidify Kuwait’s legitimacy as a member of the regional international system. Sovereignty always trumped the pan-Arab idea in the Arab League, although it would not be until the 1980s that most Arab leaders were confident enough to rhetorically privilege the state or subregional grouping over that of the Arab nation. In the meantime, the League acted to moderate the so-called Arab Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s between the ‘progressive’ nationalists and the more conservative, each claiming to represent the real soul and purpose of the nation. The status quo held because of the common norms and diplomacy embodied in the League, and, where that faltered, because of great power management from outside with which the League concurred; as in the Iraq–Kuwait case in 1961. Beyond the intra-Arab sphere, the League’s most important hobbyhorse was Israel, and the common posture towards it was the nearest that the Arab world would ever come to forging collective security.



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At the time of Israel’s creation in 1948, the Arab League decreed a common policy of economic boycott against Israel, and set up an organisation in Damascus to monitor compliance. The economic boycott was to be successfully upheld until the late 1970s, and must go down as one of the League’s most successful common actions. In 1950, members also signed the Joint Defence and Economic Cooperation Treaty, although the practice of collective defence would never match the rhetoric. Initially, progress was stymied by divisions pertaining to relations with ‘imperialist states’, especially Nasser’s campaign against the British-orchestrated Baghdad Pact which included Iraq and Jordan. However, the fall of the pro-British Iraqi monarchy in 1958 did not clear the way for much more progress. The Arab military response to Israel continued to be divided by disputes within the nationalist camp as well as between the nationalists and conservatives. In the Six Day War of June 1967, Israel moved too quickly and decisively against the frontline Arab states for a coherent Arab mobilisation to take place. The most significant Arab counter was the temporary and limited restrictions on the flow of oil to world markets by Arab producers. In the October War on 1973, the Joint Defence Treaty of the Arab League was triggered, and nine members of the League committed themselves to the defence of Egypt and Syria. While this was a significant symbolic act, it did not prevent Israel from quickly turning the tide of the combat, and the frontline states again agreed to ceasefire terms before any longer and deeper mobilisation could be tested. As in 1967, the most important response was the sanctions put in place by Arab oil producers; restrictions on supply to world markets made the price of oil quadruple by January 1974. But, significantly, Arab oil sanctions were not organised through the Arab League, but by the Arab subset of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). For all the high aspirations and rhetoric which surrounded the Arab League, its capacity for common action reached its peak in the October War of 1973. In fact, over the next 20 years the Arab League met a series of disasters which were to severely diminish the organisation in terms of both its authority and its practical capacity. What went wrong? First, while Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arabs were rhetorically attached to Arab solidarism, their societies were conservative and their political stability delicately balanced. The Gulf states were extremely cautious about the idea of subsuming themselves in a collective alliance led by the much larger Arab states of North Africa and the Levant as well as participating in armed conflict against Israel. Such a course embodied




difficult to predict risks. In the aftermath of 1973–74, the Gulf states took advantage of their new-found wealth and status to forge a more independent line; they did this by moving to develop much closer ties to the United States and the West. It was better to be subordinate to a hegemon at a distance than one close at hand! Second, the next disaster for the Arab League was the decision of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt to make peace with Israel. In 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem. In 1978–79, the Camp David negotiations led to a peace treaty which killed even the dream of the Joint Defence and Economic Cooperation Treaty. Egypt not only removed itself from any kind of collective defence, but also from the economic boycott of Israel. The Arab world was truly stunned. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League, and the League’s headquarters moved from Cairo to Tunis. Sadat himself was to be assassinated by Islamic militants in October 1981, partly because of his decision. For Sadat and his successor, Husni Mubarak, leading the Arab world simply had too many costs to be sustained. Sadat and Mubarak had come to the conclusion that Egypt needed new friends in the international system – specifically, the US and the West – and it needed to reorganise its economy with their help. In short, they redefined the Egyptian national interest in a way which now trumped Arab solidarism and the responsibilities which it implied. Third, the decline of the Arab League’s authority and practical significance would become all too obvious in the early 1980s. In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. While the Arab League was generally supportive of Iraq, when Iraq invoked the Joint Defence Treaty following the Iranian counter-invasion of Iraq in September 1982, the silence was deafening. Similarly, when Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon from June 1982, the League was quite unable to formulate a collective response. At the same time, the League was increasingly a forum for disputes which reflected ‘balance of power’-type behaviour. Iraq clashed with Syria and Libya, especially over their tacit support for Iran. Faced with a long war of attrition, Iraq also sought Egyptian support. Iraq was criticised for dealing with the Arab pariah, but faced no sanction for its unilateral initiative. As Egyptian arms and workers flowed into Iraq, and as the Iraqi regime re-engaged with the Egyptian government, the Arab League’s policy of ostracising Egypt was weakened. Egypt was gradually rehabilitated even though it did nothing to change its peace policy with Israel. In fact, Egypt was readmitted to the Arab League in May 1989, and the League’s headquarters returned to Cairo in October 1990. Egypt was by far the largest and most important Arab state, and its re-entry into the League can hardly be said to have weakened the Arab



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fold, but the idea of a common foreign and defence policy in relation to Israel was now completely dead. Fourth, the coup de grâce for the Arab League came with the Iraq– Kuwait crisis and Gulf War of 1990–91. The Arab League’s special summit held in Baghdad at the end of May 1990 – convened to discuss the issues of Jewish immigration to Israel from the former Soviet bloc as well as the building tensions between Iraq and the West over Iraq’s military industrialisation and human rights – can only be described as a disaster. The leaders of Algeria, Morocco and Oman did not attend, and Syria and Lebanon boycotted the meeting altogether. The meeting itself was dominated by Saddam Hussein and his ongoing political campaign against the West. But, using the language of common Arab values and responsibilities, Saddam’s campaign quickly expanded from focusing on the West itself towards focusing on the West’s Arab clients. In his opening statement to the conference on 28 May 1990, Saddam resurrected the latent tension between sovereignty and nationalism, arguing that: as twenty-one states, we must present a solid front against whoever deviates from pan-Arab security within our ranks so that we can contain his whims and policies . . . The Arab masses believe that pan-Arab security is an integral whole and that for pan-Arab security to become a reality, we cannot afford to regard it half-heartedly – it must be practised in every aspect of life . . . the less capable among us must work hard for greater ability that matches, is integrated with, and interacts with what is agreed by the group so that those in the vanguard can see and interact with those in the rear. The group as a whole must encourage those with greater ability to move forward with all their support and good wishes for success, without letting this lead the more capable ones into adventurism or isolation. We have to regard the power of any Arab state as belonging to all, unless it is used against the Arab Nation . . . weakness in any one of our countries is bound to affect all of us, and it will constitute a crack in the wall of pan-Arab security. Whatever weakness develops, it must respond to any offer of help from the more powerful Arab states in order to rid itself of its weakness, especially when weakness would undermine our stance vis-à-vis foreign powers, and could manifest itself in granting of facilities to these foreign powers out of fear, thus compromising the Arab Nation and pan-Arab security . . . no-one, whoever he may be, can enjoy our resources and wealth at the same time that he is fighting us and opposing our scientific and technological progress. We must




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Saddam quickly followed up this statement of general principles with specifics: he considered that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were overproducing oil for the benefit of foreign powers, and that he deemed this to be deliberately harmful to the interests of Iraq and, therefore, to the Arab nation. The differing political and economic interests of Arab states were now fully exposed. The Gulf states and Egypt had no interest in alienating the West, ceding their oil policies to Baghdad, or accepting the authority of Saddam Hussein to define the solidarist interest and then make claims over them. Saddam’s challenge was a fundamental attack on sovereignty, with Kuwait itself determined not to become a satellite state. Rebuffed by other Arab states, Saddam opened a series of direct political attacks on Kuwait and the UAE from late June 1990 which were to end in the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. The invasion of Kuwait was the most astonishing breach of Arab etiquette. An emergency Arab League conference in Cairo on 10 August 1990 demanded an unconditional withdrawal and restoration of Kuwaiti sovereignty. The summit also affirmed Saudi Arabia’s right under Article 51 of the UN Charter to call on the international community for defence assistance. Arab troops from Egypt, Syria and Morocco were dispatched. Setting the scene at the Arab League summit on 10 August 1990, Husni Mubarak had observed that the use of force among the Arab community: completely obliterates the concept of Arab solidarity and kills the idea of common interests and destiny. This forces an Arab to think of his brother as representing a potential threat to him, his security, and interests. Such doubts are bound to destroy the foundation on which the unified nation is built. (Mubarak, 1990: A4) While Syria was also in the process of picking off another of the minor actors – Lebanon – at the same time, it was only able to do this by virtue of some consensus in the Arab League. The Ta’if process which made Syria the hegemon in Lebanon was authorised by the League, and conducted with the participation of some of its key members, notably Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s move was unilateral, and the other big Arab powers were not prepared to even discuss the validity of Saddam’s claims or methods; they effectively closed the Arab League down and handed the Kuwait crisis over to the United Nations, or rather to the United States. The curtailment of the League’s diplomacy during the Kuwait crisis was a serious



transform this principle into policy and words to be implemented and unanimously adhered to. (Hussein, 1990: A2)

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blow for Iraq. While the League could not do much to respond to the conflict in practice, it remained the only really authoritative forum in which Iraq could make its case and begin to generate some legitimacy for it. Arab divisions were now on open display. The arrival of US and Western forces in Saudi Arabia was highly contentious, not least because public opinion in many of Arab states was so instinctively hostile to the West. The resolution which emerged from the Cairo conference on 10 August, for instance, saw Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan and the PLO either abstain or vote against. A conference of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo on 30 August 1990 also produced a series of strong statements against Iraq, but it was boycotted by eight members, and the secretary-general of the organisation also went on to resign (Murden, 1995: 195–258). A wrangle even developed about bringing forward the date of moving the League’s permanent headquarters back from Tunis to Cairo. An Algerian motion for the suspension of the move was rejected by only 11 of the members. The damage done to the Arab League by the Kuwait conflict was serious and lasting. The way Saddam Hussein had used the Arab idea to invade and conquer a smaller Arab state was unprecedented. The Kuwait crisis made it impossible to paper-over the deep divisions within the Arab fold between pro-Western states, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and a more independent-minded group. For the rest of the decade and beyond, Arab summits were awkward affairs, haunted by the problem of Iraq and its containment as well as by the rise and fall of an Arab–Israeli peace process. If Arab etiquette discouraged the outright failure of summits, divisions and disappointments were never far beneath the surface. And, above all, while the League might remain the most authoritative forum of the regional system and Arab international society, it was difficult not to see it as merely the generator of a great deal of self-important hot air. In March 2002, for instance, Saudi Arabia introduced an Arab– Israeli peace plan – based on the 1949 Armistice lines, a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees based on UN Security Council Resolution 194 of 1948 and the idea of a Palestinian state with a capital based in East Jerusalem – which did go on to anchor the diplomatic position of Arab states in the conflict. But, it was simply ignored by Israel and quickly forgotten by the US. The plan languished, repeatedly recycled and reignored for years to come; and no one could do a thing about it. The Arab League had become a dead-letter regime. Solidarist echoes remained, but it was quite incapable of increasing the levels of integration and collective action between Arab states or their peoples (recall




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3 The subregionalisation of the secondary institutions of the Middle East The fading of the Arab League in the 1980s and 1990s was reflected in the rise of a number of other secondary institutions in the Arab world, specifically subregional organisations which aspired to deepen political and economic integration among adjoining states. In May 1981, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE signed a treaty at a summit in Abu Dhabi which formed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Elsewhere, Iraq moved to institutionalise its alliances with Egypt, Jordan and North Yemen, which it had built up over the years of the Iran–Iraq War, by formally establishing the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) on 16 February 1989. Finally, in North Africa, while Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia had set up a number of standing councils as far back as 1964, on 17 February 1989 they established the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) which aspired not only to greater economic cooperation, including the creation of a North African Common Market, but also to pursue common foreign and defence principles. The new subregional groupings continued to pay homage to older solidarist ideals, but the ambitions were more modest: less top-down vision, more bottom-up integration. The GCC was the most obvious example of this. The GCC states formed a natural subregional community: all had similar political systems; all were made relatively prosperous by the oil trade; and all faced similar development and security challenges. The Charter of the GCC proposed the ‘coordination, integration and interconnection’ of the member states in the fields of economics and finance; commerce, customs and communications; and education and culture (Charter of the Gulf Cooperation Council, 1981: Article 4). Indeed, from June 1981, the GCC introduced measures which promised to create a GCC common market: a customs union was established; regulations covering travel, work and business within the GCC were liberalised; unified patents and standards introduced; and proposals for joint investment in roads, telecommunications and electricity projects initiated. The GCC also solidified the existing cooperation between the states on matters of internal security, including the monitoring of borders, the surveillance of dissidents, and information sharing. Broadly, a functional web of contacts was gradually fostered and institutionalised.



Figure 6.2). The pragmatic impulses of the Arab state had overpowered the idealistic impulses of Arab solidarism.

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But, while there was some functional integration in the realms of economics and internal security, the members remained very cautious about pressing ahead with too much political or defence integration. The GCC’s Charter itself said little about security or defence cooperation, with Articles 11 and 12 merely outlining the possibility of forming ministerial councils across various functional areas. The GCC defence chiefs met in a standing committee after 1981, but it meant little. Kuwait especially acted to put a brake on progress fearing both too much integration into the Saudi sphere on the one hand, and the prompting of a response from either Iraq or Iran on the other. The Peninsula Shield Force (some 10,000 men) was set up but joint GCC exercises were sporadic, and there was no attempt to integrate arms-procurement policies. The GCC states maintained the enormous inefficiency of procuring a myriad of small amounts of different equipment from different foreign suppliers. Similarly, in the realm of foreign policy, there were differing perspectives over relations with the US, Israel and Iran, not to mention a number of unresolved inter-GCC conflicts, mostly over minor border issues which were apt to blow up. In the absence of proactive Saudi leadership, a common foreign and security policy seemed unlikely to develop. None of the smaller states wanted creeping Saudi domination as the price of more cooperation, and neither were the Saudis particularly inclined to press the point. Individual GCC members continued to look to outside powers, especially in bilateral relations with the United States, as the ultimate guarantee of their security. In the realm of high politics, the GCC was really more a body of definition than integration and common action. The organisation was established in May 1981, and it always looked as though the Gulf states had taken the opportunity to form up as a distinct subcommunity and psychological perimeter while Iraq was preoccupied in its war with Iran. The GCC did create a distinct sphere although, as events demonstrated, it was ultimately not enough to stop Saddam Hussein from making pan-Arabist claims on them. When push came to shove, the GCC could not save Kuwait; only the power of the US could. If the GCC was only a partial success in terms of the development of regional international society, the other subregional secondary institutions formed at the end of the 1980s were complete failures. The ACC was set up to include a permanent secretariat in Amman, and its members signed up to annual presidential summits and regular ministerial meetings. On the face of it, the ACC represented a powerful locus of resources and influence. Its combined population was over 80 million people. Iraq gained a notion of strategic depth. For Egypt, it was a precursor to the




restoration of its respectability among Arab states. But, the economic and foreign policy co-ordination envisaged at the time of the ACC’s formation would not be realised. Once back in the Arab fold, Egypt began to manoeuvre more freely. Indeed, Egypt was almost immediately drawn into a regional balance of power game over the future of Lebanon in 1989 in which it sided with Syria and Saudi Arabia to support the Ta’if process against Saddam Hussein’s attempts to prevent Syrian pre-eminence in the country. The ACC went on to meet complete failure with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. With Egypt and Iraq lining up on different sides of the conflict, the bitter enmities created ended with Egyptian forces playing a major role in routing Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The fate of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) was similar. Set up to provide some collective weight with respect to dealing with the emerging giant of the European Community, as well as to smooth out some local conflicts, the AMU would struggle to overcome the fact that since its members scarcely traded with each other their real interests lay in competing rather than cooperating with each other in European markets and for European investment (Tripp, 1995: 296–8). Little integration in either political or economic terms was achieved, and within two years of its foundation the AMU ceased to meet amid renewed rivalry between its big players, Morocco and Algeria. One of the principal stumbling blocks was Morocco’s presence in Western Sahara which was opposed by the Polisario Front backed by Algeria. The periodic attempts to revive the AMU, notably in 2005, continue to be stymied by Morocco’s determination to resist the full independence of Western Sahara. In short, the AMU not only failed to develop the functional-level cooperation to which it aspired, but actually tended to highlight the political divisions and economic competitions which existed between its members.

Whither the Arab idea The pan-Arab nationalist idea had had real power. Arab elites and peoples in the Levant, Egypt and the Maghreb had egged each other on in dreaming of a regional international society. But, in the end, Arab solidarism failed to overpower the consolidation of territorialised states or the growing competition between those states in the regional international system. After a brief flowering of solidarist values and institutions, then, both the levels of solidarism and actual integration fell. The subregional groups did little to rescue Arab solidarism from its increasingly ‘dead-letter’ trajectory. Indeed, by highlighting the disappointments and growing differences between Arab states, the secondary institutions



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sometimes became a forum for overt balance of power-type behaviour (recall Figure 6.2). In retrospect, it seems apparent that the conditions for the development of the region’s secondary institutions never existed. Aside from the cultural differences which exist within the Arab world and the inherent tendency of territorialised states to pursue selfish interests, Charles Tripp made the convincing argument in the mid-1990s that the authoritarian nature of the Arab state was among the most formidable obstacles to the development of regional organisations. Developing secondary institutions requires some familiarity with the give-and-take of real negotiations and a preparedness to accept real compromises; ultimately, it means ceding some sovereignty to another body with all the implications which that involves. According to Tripp, to invest an institution with power, to encourage the growth of institutional memory, to establish impersonal norms of political behaviour, and to submit to the rule of law, regardless of the outcome for one’s own political survival, would be to go against the practice of most of the Middle Eastern states. Highly personalized political regimes, founded on patronage and on the principle that the ruler should never be systematically answerable to the ruled, cannot contemplate with equanimity the establishment of a system which would inevitably entail their destruction. (Tripp, 1995: 303–4) The undemocratic governments of the Arab world have never been prepared to cede powers, trust their security to other Arab states or subject themselves to more scrutiny and criticism. It is perhaps no accident that the English school’s portrait of international society is dominated by a liberal analysis; liberal democracy simply makes the ‘thickening’ of secondary institutions so much easier.

4 The Islamic dimension in regional international society If the Arab idea has run into the ground since the 1970s, another transnational idea provided an alternative solidarism: that of Islam. Across large parts of the Muslim world, Islamic religion continues to influence the political, social and cultural life of hundreds of millions of people. In more than 50 states stretching from West Africa to the Philippines, Muslims constitute a majority, and the Muslim Diaspora has become a global phenomenon. In many places, Islam confounded Western models of modernisation in which religion was edged from the public to the private




sphere. In countries which profess to be distinctively Islamic – such as Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, the Gulf states, Iran and Pakistan – various adaptations of Shari‘a law remain the bedrock of social life. In many secular Muslim states, leaders increasingly have had to pay lip service to Islamic ideals. As the energy of the Arab idea declined, the Islamic idea rose, although the practical manifestations of this phenomenon would also be less than clear cut. Islamic ideals and realities To the extent that Islam has a tradition of theorising about international relations, it embodies a powerful call for Muslim unity. In the thousand years after the Prophet Muhammad, Islamic international relations was idealised as a division between believers and non-believers: in theory, between the Realm of Islam/Peace (dar al-islam) and the Realm of Unbelief/War (dar al-harb). Within dar al-islam, Muslims were united by their submission to God through Shari‘a law, and as long as they adhered to an acceptable version of Shari‘a could have no just cause for engaging in conflict with each other. Meanwhile those outside the realm of Islam could not be accorded equal respect or legal recognition. But, as Amira Bennison argued in Chapter 3, the stark juxtaposition between realms of Islam and the infidel was always more ideal than reality. From the earliest period of Islamic history, Muslims were divided among themselves in doctrinal and territorial terms, and the actions of Muslim states were largely separated from the doctrines of the Islamic religion. The chapters by Bennison and Yurdusev also ably chart the centuries of worldly relations among different Muslim powers as well as between Muslim and non-Muslim states. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, and especially following the end of Ottoman expansion, Muslim powers were not only reaching agreements with non-Muslim states which represented the de facto recognition of other ways of life but were increasingly having to do so on unfavourable terms. Islamic ideals were only plausible if a certain degree of unity existed across the umma and dar al-islam was largely a world unto itself. With the demise of the caliphate of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims would have little choice but to view the world through the prism of Westphalia. The territorial state became a fact of life across the Muslim world, and almost all Muslim states – other than during the odd passing Islamic revolution – have been willing participants in the main conventions of the international system. When signing up to international agreements, Muslim leaders explicitly recognised the principles of territorial sovereignty, noninterference in the internal affairs of others and the peaceful resolution



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of international disputes. Today, the ideals of a world divided between dar al-islam and dar al-harb and of a single umma united under a caliphate are the fantasies of only a few Islamic extremists. The way in which the principal international organisation of the Muslim world, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), functions demonstrates the diffuse influence of Islamic values on Muslim states. The organisation emerged as part of the response to an attempt by a Christian extremist in August 1969 to burn down the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Amid the outrage that swept the Muslim world, a group of Muslim countries resolved at a summit in Rabat, Morocco, in September 1969 to create an institution capable of representing the Islamic posture to the world. The signatories of the OIC agreed that meetings of their heads of state should take place once every three years, and foreign ministers once every year. A permanent headquarters and bureaucracy was set up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to promote a permanent stream of dialogue among Muslims. However, while the OIC was born in a moment of extraordinary pan-Islamic outrage, what emerged was a very limited intergovernmental alliance. The Charter of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (1972) affirmed a commitment to the UN Charter and the principles of sovereign equality between states, non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states and the peaceful resolution of all disputes. The OIC has nearly always argued that it was vital to stick to international law and UN Security Council resolutions as the basis for its collective posture. In practice, too, the capacity of the OIC to unify and mobilise Muslim states was limited by religious and national divisions, as well as political differences which tend to coalesce around the big states, notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. The big Muslim states differed over their interpretations of Islam, as well as to what role the OIC should have in international crises. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia jousted with Nasserist and Ba’thist states, while in the 1980s the Kingdom had to parry the activist energy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Saudi–Iranian cold war especially paralysed the OIC, and made it a forum for a conflict over the stewardship of the hajj. The reality was that the OIC was really a secular organisation and its members were very much grounded in the realities of state system and raisons d’état. What the OIC was able to do was provide an authoritative forum to discuss the application of Islamic principles in the world. It could articulate common Islamic aspirations and preferences. For instance, in all the post-Cold War conflicts in which Muslims were involved, beleaguered brethren could expect political support, money and humanitarian aid




from the Muslim states. The OIC gave Muslim states some confidence as international actors, and in the context of the OIC’s collective posture they often showed a greater preparedness to call for international action, promote conflict-related fund-raising and send aid. What beleaguered Muslims could not expect was that Muslim states or the OIC might band together to apply effective economic and military sanctions against nonMuslim adversaries. Even with respect to such keystone Islamic causes as the Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya conflicts, the OIC position was almost always based around respecting international law and backing moderate approaches to problem-solving. By the 1990s, for instance, Israel was still widely regarded as the enemy of Muslims, but the OIC consensus accepted the principle of a peaceful settlement under the landfor-peace formula defined by UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. A number of the members did not agree with this posture, but almost all were prepared to sign up to the consensus at OIC summits because it reflected the majority mood. Thus, like the region’s other major secondary institutions, the great limitation of the OIC was in the realm of action. Expressing generalised Islamic ideals and sensibilities was one thing, but doing things was quite another. OIC summits looked impressive, but Muslim states typically recoiled from forging meaningful alliances with each other, risking direct conflict with non-Muslim powers or seeking to supersede the role of the UN and West in conflict management. An influential coalition of Muslim states, including Egypt, Morocco, the Gulf states, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, tended to put limits on the more ambitious aspirations of Islamic opinion, partly because of their close ties to the West. While the OIC was reasonably good at articulating an Islamic viewpoint, until most Muslim states could agree to co-ordinate collective actions the OIC would continue to be one of the international system’s great underachievers. The prospects for the development of effective collective action looked slight. Muslim states were too diverse, too suspicious of each other, too tied up with non-Muslim powers and too lacking in confidence to consistently act as a community. For all the talk about the potential for civilisational politics in the post-Cold War world, then, Islamic solidarism did little more than to produce another ‘dead-letter’ secondary institution (recall Figure 6.2). Islam’s greatest effect in the contemporary world was not at the level of the international system or international society, but at the level of interhuman society. Islam was a force to be reckoned with in world society because hundreds of millions of people identified with some form of Islamic identity. Islam is not a monolithic religion, but it did inform



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the views of well over a billion people in the world’s population. Most Muslims believed that the Islamic umma was significant, the West was overbearing, East Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa mosque should be restored to Islamic stewardship, and Muslim peoples were besieged by malign foreign forces in such places as the Balkans, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir and the Philippines. But, to unify the Islamic umma as a community of thought and action would require the wholesale restructuring of the Muslim world, and only the most revolutionary Islamists thought that this was remotely worth considering. The contemporary Islamist seemed destined to be perpetually disappointed by the mismatch between Islamic theory and Muslim realities. Islam could not be seen as a transnational actor in the state system, only a transnational community of thought; it was one of the world’s great bodies of immanent preference.

5 Conclusion: the Middle East today (as indicated by its secondary institutions) The territorialised state implanted in the Middle East was such a powerful form of organisation that it overpowered other concepts of community and governance. Two transnational ideas – pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism – continued to cast a shadow over the region, but they could not stop the territorial state from consolidating its own reality. By the 1980–90s, the pan-Arab idea had run out of energy. The international system and international society of the region now appeared to be subject to two countervailing forces. While the rise of the pan-Islamic idea contributed to international society, it seemed likely to confirm the ‘dead-letter’ functioning of the region’s secondary institutions. Islamism was not the basis for meaningful integration or collective action. At the same time, the Iraq Wars of 1990–91 and 2003–present day tested even these dead-letter institutions to near-destruction. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others cooperated with external powers, principally the US, to put down Iraq in order to safeguard their own independence and interests. The taboo of Arab states waging open war against one another was comprehensively breached. To the extent that the Arab League was even able to meet, it descended into vitriolic division. So, why had Middle Eastern states been unable to progress their relative solidarism towards something more integrated? The internal character of most Arab and Muslim states was a factor. Democratic governance was largely absent. Most of the states had been hijacked by unrepresentative interest groups or minorities who quickly devoted themselves to




sustaining the privileges which the stewardship of their territorial state conferred. Meanwhile, the champions of solidarism had little to show for their efforts. The few forays into increasing the levels of real integration had demonstrated tremendous risks and insufficient pay-offs. Moreover, when powerful Arab leaders such as Nasser and Saddam Hussein sought to exercise leadership of the solidarist idea, it immediately bred suspicion among other states, priming concerns about the relative gains which they might be making. The safer course for most states was to pursue a more self-interested modus operandi. By the 1990s, the regional international system appeared to be moving towards a balance of power system, although an unusual one because the actors did not develop a high level of political and security interdependency among themselves; to the extent that the local actors manoeuvred into coalitions, it was often as much about influencing or seeking the approval of an external actor, the United States, as other local actors. The Middle East had developed what Hedley Bull might have called a ‘contrived balance of power’, structured to maintain the pluralism of the system. But, devolving the regulation of the regional international system to the US was not to be the prescription for stability. The Iraq War of 2003 and its aftermath was stability disaster. It not only left Iraq in chaos, but threatened the very borders of the Iraqi state itself. If Iraq did begin to break up, or if the US took a step back from holding the ring, it was easy to imagine the Balkanisation of Iraq and the outbreak of a ‘great game’ among regional powers. Common values might mitigate the resulting conflict, but it was unlikely that the region’s ‘deadletter’ secondary institutions could play a decisive role in early conflict resolution. In the meantime, balance of power-type behaviour became increasingly overt, with a pro-US Sunni Arab bloc led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia seeking to counteract the apparent advance of an anti-US group which included Iran and Syria as well as their substate allies Hizbullah and Hamas. The contest for influence was most evident in the context of the Iraq, Lebanon and Arab–Israeli conflicts, and it undermined the remnants of collegiality in the secondary institutions of the region. The state of play was perhaps no better demonstrated than in events involving the Arab League in the early part of 2008. In January, a meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo agreed a plan to stabilise the fractious politics of Lebanon by orchestrating the election of a new president and introducing political reforms. But, the agreement stalled, and with Syria being blamed for preventing the implementation of the plan for Lebanon, the differences quickly escalated into a partial boycott of



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the Arab League summit in Damascus in late March. The leaders of half of the League’s 22 members declined to attend. Egypt and Saudi Arabia pointedly sent only second-rank officials. The government of Lebanon refused to attend at all. At a time when the Arab League had a stack of pressing regional security issues to consider, the League was as much part of the problem as the solution. For the foreseeable future, international relations in the Middle East seemed destined to move back and forth between a dead-letter international society and the formation of an overt balance of power system and anarchical society (recall Figure 6.2). International society appeared to have reached a developmental impasse.




Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation: From Arab Interstate Societies to an Arab-Islamic World Society Morten Valbjørn

Introduction1 During the summer of 2006, the Palestine conflict once again turned ‘hot’ when intense fighting erupted across the Israeli/Lebanese border. Besides 34 days of violent clashes with Israeli forces, Hizbullah was also engaged in a more symbolic, or ‘cold’, collision with the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian leaders denouncing in public the Shi‘i -Arab movement for ‘dragging the region into adventures’. By publicly criticising an Arab actor’s direct – and even rather successful – challenge to Israel in favour of a covert siding with Israel and the United States, these three ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ regimes, as they were termed, were at variance with some of the basic norms in the classic ‘game of Arab politics’. Following US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s (2006) (in)famous depiction of the Summer War 2006 as ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East’ some observers saw these reactions as a sign of how Arab politics had ceased being distinctly Arab. The very notion of a discrete Arab world was dismissed as a mirage without any relevance for a post-Arab twentyfirst century. Regional dynamics in this new Middle East would instead either resemble a ‘normal state system’ or be defined by sectarian schisms within Islam as reflected in the clash between Shi‘i Hizbullah and three ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ states (cf. Susser, 2006). Other observers challenged this post-Arab sectarian reading of the regional reactions. First, at the popular level it was difficult to detect much sectarian divide. The predominantly Sunni Arab populations watching the conflict on al Jazeera resounded with expressions of sympathy with the Shi‘i Hizbullah. Regional opinion polls were ranking 140



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Hassan Nasrallah as the most admired regional leader and the US and Israel – rather than the Shi‘i Iran – were identified as the biggest external threats to the Arab world (Telhami, 2007b; Murphy, 2006). In addition to cross-sectarian cooperation between Hizbullah and Hamas, non-state actors such as the Sunni-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan issued statements in favour of Hizbullah, and the influential Sunni-Islamist TV star Yusuf al-Qaradawi fulminated against the Arab regimes for their weakness (Saad-Ghorayeb, 2007). Second, by broadening the perspective beyond a narrow interstate domain, the regional split exposed by the Summer War not only looks less like a Shi‘i/Sunni rift than a regimes/peoples divide (Lynch, 2006a), and hardly post-Arab. The popular debate was imbued with references to classic Arab nationalist slogans about Arab solidarity, the security of the Arab nation, resistance to occupation, the liberation of Palestine and the struggle against imperialism. Hizbullah was likewise successfully portraying itself as an Arab rather than Shi‘i movement as reflected in posters at demonstrations comparing ‘Nasrallah 2006’ with ‘Nasser 1956’ (Fuller, 2006; Saad-Ghorayeb, 2007). Against this background, some observers referred to a ‘revival of a sense of Arab nationalism’ (Khouri, 2006) or even prophesied a return to regional dynamics known from the ‘old’ pan-Arabist Middle East of the 1950–60s (Rubin, 2007). Besides being a debate on how to grasp the specific regional reactions to the Summer War, this controversy also illustrates the continuing relevance of one of the classic problematiques in the more general debate on the (un)exceptional nature of Middle East international relations (Valbjørn, 2004a). At a more implicit level, the debate thus represents the latest contribution to a classic controversy about whether Arab politics is (still) distinctly Arab as Jerrold Green (1986) once asked. This question also holds relevance to this volume’s ambition to explore not only various forms of interstate societies but also the world society domain at the regional level. In view of the prominent position of Arab nationalism in debates about Middle East politics, it is thus natural to ask whether it (still) makes sense to speak about a distinct Arab international society carrying features putting inter-Arab politics apart from the global international society, and if so to consider how this is reflected within the interstate and world society domains. These questions are addressed in this chapter. Following a conceptual clarification on who the Arabs are and what Arab nationalism is (section 1), some of the traits usually referred to in accounts of how Arab politics differ from the global international society are examined (section 2). While supporting a claim about the existence of a distinct Arab international society these accounts



Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation

often draw primarily on Arab politics from the 1950–60s. The bulk of the chapter (section 3) is therefore devoted to a historically informed exploration examining the ‘Arabness’ of Arab politics from the late Ottoman Empire up to the Summer War. This examination proceeds along three dimensions: it traces the ebb and flow of various interpretations of Arab nationalism, locates the place and importance of an Arab identity in the world society domain and identifies the nature of the Arab interstate society/ies. The argument is that it still makes sense to speak of Arab politics as Arab and to perceive inter-Arab relations within the framework of a regional Arab international society, but that it is necessary also to distinguish between a number of interstate societies sharing an Arab dimension but situated at different positions in the pluralist/solidarist spectrum. Moreover, it is important to pay attention to how the interstate domain has become increasingly pluralist and less distinctively Arab but in growing conformity with the Westphalian elements of the global interstate society. This does however not make the international society post-Arab nor Arab nationalism obsolete. In the world society domain, it is possible to locate yet another transformation of the obstinate Arab nationalism. Compared to earlier versions this ‘non-statist Political Arabism’ is more open-ended and dialogical; more independent and popular-driven than state-led; closely related to the new trans-Arab media and dominated by non-state actors advocating an Arab-Islamic order. While the Arab dimension of the Arab international society in this way has become more visible in the Arab-Islamic world society than the interstate domain, the Arab states are not immune to its influence. This appears at the end of the chapter (section 4), which returns to the Summer War of 2006 and suggests that the regional reactions reflect a ‘New Arab Cold War’ carrying similarities with while at the same time holding important differences from the 1950–60s ‘old’ Arab Cold War. The chapter thus examines whether and how Arab politics (still) can be perceived as Arab, whereas the discussion of the specific drivers for change in and of the regional order is addressed in Chapter 9. The specific nature of the various Arab secondary institutions is only touched on briefly as these are examined in Chapter 6.

1 ‘Who are the Arabs?’: Arab nationalism and the various Arabisms Recalling the observation by T. E. Lawrence (1935: 33) that ‘a first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were’, it is necessary first to consider ‘who the Arabs are’, the ‘Arabness’ of the Arab



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world and what Arab nationalism is. Following Sati al-Husri, one of the seminal Arab nationalist ideologists, ‘[e]very Arabic-speaking people are an Arab people’ and hence ‘every individual belonging to one of these Arabic-speaking peoples is an Arab’. This identity is an objective fact as a native Arabic-speaker ‘is an Arab regardless of his own wishes’ (cited in Dawisha, 2003: 72). As for Arab nationalism, it is a struggle to reunite all Arabs in a single independent state stretching from Morocco to Iraq and from Syria to the Sudan and by this transforming the Arab Kulturnation to an Arab Staatnation as explained by the Herder-inspired al-Husri (Dawisha, 2003; Tibi, 1997). At closer inspection, the picture gets much more complex. Apart from the pure linguistic definition, where anybody with an Arabic mother tongue is an Arab irrespective of residence or the person’s own selfidentification, the term can also refer to all Arabic-speaking citizens in countries with Arabic as the official language sharing the aspirations of the Arabic-speaking peoples as stated by the Arab League. Finally, it can also designate a special ‘way of life’. The famous medieval ‘Arab’ scholar Ibn Khaldun did not consider himself as an Arab, as he reserved the term for the Bedouins. The delimitations and the ‘Arabness’ of the Arab world are also contested. While Egypt today is hosting the Arab League, whose first secretary-general, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, claimed that ‘Egypt was an Arab country before the time of Christ’ (Dawisha, 2003: 122), at the dawn of the twentieth century the first pan-Arabist Negib Azoury argued that Egyptians did ‘not belong to the Arab race; they are of African Berber family’ (Dawisha, 2003: 25). The importance of being an Arab compared with other dimensions of a person’s collective identity, for example belonging to a certain family, clan, village, territorial state or a larger religious community, not only varies over time but also in space across the Arab world. As for the identification with the existing territorial state vs a larger Arab community (that is, the classic al-wataniyya/al-qawmiyya question), in the Gulf states the former usually takes precedence, whereas the opposite has been the case in the Mashriq, and Egypt and Yemen figure in between (Hinnebusch, 2005). Finally, it is also disputed whether being an Arab should carry any specific political implications. While al-Husri, inspired by German Romanticism, argued that people speaking the same language ‘constitute one nation, and so they should have a unified state’ (cited in Dawisha, 2003: 2), the example of Spanish-speaking Latin American countries illustrates that commonality of language does not necessarily impinge upon the political realm or imply large-scale unity schemes. To avoid even more confusion in an already very complex debate it is imperative to clarify the present terminology:2 Arab nationalism




144 Morten Valbjørn Table 7.1

Arab nationalisms.

Special bonds exist between people speaking Arabic as they belong to the same distinct Arab nation constituted by common language, history, culture and tradition. Cultural Arabism

Political Arabism

Pan-Arabism

←−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→ The Arab world as a cultural space.

The Arab world as an anarchical international society.

The Arab world as a Pan-system.

embodies the idea that some kind of special bonds exist between Arabicspeaking peoples sharing not only a common language but also history, culture and tradition. This general notion is subdivided into three variants depending on the specific and political implications of this idea. Pan-Arabist perceives the Arab world as a ‘pan-system’ based upon an Arab nation existing behind the façade of a number of artificial Arab territorial states (Khalidi, 1978). The ultimate goal is territorial unity in terms of a merger of the existing states, including the territory of Palestine, into a ‘true’ Arab nation-state and until then the raison de la nation Arabe (that is, common Arab interests and security concerns) must take precedence over a narrow raison d’état. Political Arabist perceives the Arab world like an anarchical international society, where Arabs living in different states are linked by special bonds, which also must be reflected in their political organisation and mutual relations (Khalidi, 1991: vii). Politics should accordingly not only be informed by a narrow self-interest but also comply with a number of distinct Arab norms, rules and values including certain obligations and a commitment to solidarity. To the Cultural Arabist the Arab world is only a cultural space in the sense that Arabs feel a sense of cultural proximity and recognition of common habits and customs, but without carrying any substantial political commitments or obligations (Dawisha, 2003: 253) (Table 7.1).

2 The Arab world as an international society at the regional level This Arab nationalist notion about special bonds between Arabs has during the years given rise to a heated discussion on the nature of Arab politics constituting along with Islam one of the classic problématiques in the more general debate on the (un)exceptional nature of Middle East



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politics (Valbjørn, 2004a; 2004b). Proponents of the view that international relations adhere to the same rules everywhere rejecting regionally specific dynamics thus present the Arab Middle East as the ideal ‘hard case’. In his seminal study on The Origins of Alliances, Stephen Walt (1987) for instance explains how the presence of Arab nationalism made this region a particularly interesting place for a study of alliance-making. If his neorealist hypotheses derived from European experiences even applied here, he saw it as a strong testimony to their general explanatory power. Arab nationalism likewise figures prominently in arguments on why it is necessary to pay attention to a distinct regional level with dynamics at variance with the global international society. An examination of some of the literature by scholars living on the borderline between IR and Middle East studies thus reveals a number of traits of Arab politics fitting poorly with a quasi-realist Westphalian model making inter-Arab relations different not only in degree but also in kind from international relations elsewhere, including other parts of the post-colonial world (Noble, 1991: 55). As for the regional context, it is anarchic lacking a centralised authority but at the same time marked by a strong supra-state community based on a common membership to the Arab nation. This has been reflected in a high level of inter-Arab interconnectedness at the state and society level making the Arab world into what Paul Noble (1991: 56) has famously depicted as a ‘vast sound chamber in which currents of thought, as well as information, circulated widely and enjoyed considerable resonance across state frontiers’. Instead of resembling a set of billiard balls coming into contact only at their hard outer shell, the Arab interstate relations should in his view therefore be perceived as ‘a set of interconnected organisms separated only by porous membranes, or, alternatively, a large-scale domestic system divided into compartments of varying degrees of permeability’ (Noble, 1991: 57). Owing to this commitment to an Arab nation, explicitly declared in the constitutions of numerous Arab states (Hinnebusch, 2003), the Arab states have moreover often been perceived as ‘territorial states’ rather than ‘proper’ nation-states (Kienle, 1990). This regional context with its state/nation misfit and resemblance with an ‘over-arching Arab polity’ (Kienle, 1990: 2) has in more ways put interArab relations apart from the global level. First, the classic notion about ‘the national interest’ becomes an ambiguous behavioural guide for Arab states facing a schism between a narrow raison d’état and a need to be perceived as being in line with a raison de la nation Arabe implying a commitment to Arab ‘core issues’. This is not only reflected in the profound




impact of Palestine on Arab politics, which according to Michael Hudson (1977: 118) can hardly be overemphasised. An important dimension of the Arab game of politics has thus been about monopolising the meaning of being Arab, while discrediting rivals by presenting them as acting at variance with the ‘Arab cause’ (Barnett, 1998). Second, the traditional ‘inside/outside’ notion (Walker, 1993) appears in more ways of limited relevance to Arab politics, where the external and internal have been so intertwined that the distinction blurs. Domestic politics also takes place at the regional level, where Arab regimes lacking electoral legitimacy try to gain popular support by presenting themselves as the most ardent defender of the Arab cause (Telhami, 1999). At the same time, regional rivalries include the domestic scene. The interconnectedness of the Arab states and the permeability of their borders thus provide aspiring Arab powers a unique opportunity for meddling in the domestic politics of other Arab states based on claims of acting on a mandate from the entire Arab nation. As often noted within this literature, the challenge to the state system in the Arab world thus differs from other post-colonial areas owing to the twin pressure from below in terms of substate minorities calling for secession – similar to elsewhere – and from above in the form of supra-state movements advocating amalgamation of the existing states (Hinnebusch, 2003: 54). The classic example of what Roger Owen (2000: 74) describes as ‘a habitual willingness to act across international borders that seems unparalleled elsewhere in the non-European world’, is Nasser’s famous speeches. They were broadcast by the Egyptian radio station Sawt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) resonating throughout the Arab ‘sound chamber’ and conceived by other Arab leaders as a greater security threat than Egyptian tanks and guns. This points to a third often mentioned distinct feature of Arab politics. ‘Soft power’ derived from ideological appeal and from being perceived as protecting ‘Arab interests’ has usually constituted a much more important commodity than military ‘hard power’. Thus, inter-Arab conflict has, as Bahgat Korany (1999: 57) observes, generally been less militarised than elsewhere. While the inter-Arab rivalry has – with the exception of the Iraqi invasion in Kuwait – seldom evolved into the same kind of open ‘hot’ warfare as conflicts with non-Arab Israel, this duelling with symbols and images rather than militaries has nevertheless not been without impact. This is reflected in numerous (attempted) coups d’état or revolts and in costly foreign policy adventures and puzzling alliances incompatible with a strict raison d’état – and incomprehensible from a conventional IR perspective – but sometimes necessary to counter subversive charges of being in conflict with an ‘Arab cause’.




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If (a) an ‘anarchical international society’ exists when a ‘group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’ (Bull, 1995: 13) and we at the same time (b) recall the attention of the classic English school (Wight, 1977: 33; Bull, 1995: 15) to how an international society may presuppose some degree of cultural unity in terms of a shared identity and ‘we-feeling’, and combine this with (c) the new English school’s concern for the regional level (Buzan, 2004: Chapter 7), this account of the distinct Arab traits in Arab politics not only challenges the claim that the Middle East ‘best fits the realist view’ (Nye, 1997: 148). It also supports the idea about the existence of an Arab international society at the regional level at variance with some of the master institutions of the global international society. The non-intervention derivative of the sovereignty institution appears for instance much weaker in inter-Arab affairs and although nationalism also figures as a prominent Arab institution, it carries completely different implications.

3 Arab international societies in transformation While supporting a claim about the existence of a distinct Arab international society, these accounts of the Arabness of Arab politics are often substantiated with references to Arab politics in the 1950–60s. The emergence of Arab nationalism, however, precedes this period and the notion of Arabic-speaking peoples constituting a distinct nation is, as noted earlier, disputed when it comes to the derived implications. Following Buzan’s (2004) reconceptualisation of the international society, first, by dividing it into an interstate society and a world society domain and, second, by subdividing the former into various forms of interstate societies along a pluralist/solidarist spectrum, it is against this background relevant to consider whether an Arab international society was only a phenomenon of the 1950–60s and, if not so, to examine the extent of transformations within this regional international society. This section therefore engages in a historically informed exploration examining the ‘Arabness’ of Arab politics from the late Ottoman Empire up to the Summer War. It proceeds along three dimensions with the aim of (a) tracing the ebb and flow of various interpretations of Arab nationalism, (b) locating the place and importance of an Arab identity in the world society domain and (c) identifying the nature of the Arab interstate society/ies based on the typologies suggested by Buzan (2004) (Table 7.2).




Era

Ottoman

Interwar years

1950–67

1970s

Late 20th century

21st century

Form of Arab nationalism

Cultural Arabism

Conservative pan-Arabism Local Political Arabism

Revolutionary pan-Arabism Conservative Political Arabism

Intergovernmental Political Arabism

Weak Political Arabism

Non-statist Political Arabism

Kind of world society

Islamic world society

Emerging Arab world society

Arab world society

Arab world society

‘Thinner’ Arab world society

Arab-Islamic world society

Kind of interstate society

Ottoman suzerainty Member of European international society

Coexistence/ cooperative Arab interstate society

Convergence Arab interstate society

Cooperative Arab interstate society

Coexistence/ power-political Arab interstate society

Coexistence/ power-political interstate society



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Table 7.2 The transformations of Arab nationalisms, Arab interstate and world societies.


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How far back in time can an Arab international society related to the Arab nationalist notion about special bonds between Arabs be traced? Following Milton Viorst (2006: 9) ‘Arab nationalism, by any definition, was born in the arid desert of Arabia in the seventh century’, which is a view tallying with the conventional Arab nationalist narrative. Sati alHusri for instance took great pains to show how the Arabs had existed long before the advent of Islam and how the glorious achievements of Islamic history were a testament to Arab genius (Dawisha, 2003: 70). The term ‘Arab’ can in fact be traced all the way back to Assyrian inscriptions and is also known from Greek and Roman references to Felix Arabia and Arabia Petrea. It is also true that Islam originally held Arab elements: the Qur’an was revealed ‘in a clear Arab tongue’, the earliest umma was made up almost entirely of Arabic-speakers, and the glorious Rashidun era was a time of Islamo-Arabic caliphates. Nevertheless, Arab nationalism is a modern phenomenon gaining political significance only in the twentieth century and before that regional relations were a far cry from constituting a distinct Arab international society. Already by the year 1000 to be an Arab did not confer religious pre-eminence nor political influence, and until the mid-nineteenth century or even later ‘Arab’ referred either to – recalling Ibn Khaldun – a special way of life or to an ethnic identity of marginal importance compared to various other dimensions of a person’s identity. At the height of the Ottoman Empire, its Arabic-speaking subjects thus primarily saw themselves as part of a shared Islamic enterprise (Kramer, 1993). In the late nineteenth century a number of developments in the decaying Ottoman Empire contributed to what George Antonius famously labelled as an ‘Arab awakening’. A growing European presence was accompanied by the spread of nationalist and liberal ideas as well as the creation of new educational establishments; within the Ottoman Empire a variety of nationalist movements in Egyptian, Tunisian, Zionist, Greek, Armenian incarnations were emerging alongside the Young Turks’ aspiration for a ‘Turkification’; the Westernised tanzimat (reforms) introduced ideas about popular participation, constitutions and parliaments but were also marked by an effort at centralisation at the expense of local Arab notables; and the concern for Islam’s ancestors (salaf ) among Islamic modernists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh contributed to a growing attention to the early glorious Arab era of Islam (Hourani, 1983).



Emerging Cultural Arabism in an Islamic world society under Ottoman suzerainty (the pre-World War I era)

These influences slowly gave rise to the idea that the Arabic-speaking peoples were part of the same Arab nation. As would also later be the case, its further implications were contested. The main current during the time of the Ottoman Empire represented most of all a version of Cultural Arabism. The role of a distinct Arab culture and language achieved new prominence as reflected in the rise of the literary Nahda movement calling for an Arab cultural renaissance. The political aims were however few and mostly limited to administrative reforms (for example Arabic should also be an official language) and decentralisations (for example Arab provinces should hold administrative autonomy) within a multinational Ottoman Empire based on equality and liberty. While some pointed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a model to imitate, Abd alRahman al-Kawakibi for instance called for bringing the caliphate from the ‘corrupted Turks’ in Istanbul back to Hijaz. A person from the line of Quraysh should be elected as caliph because Arabs ‘are of all nations the most suitable to be an authority in religion’ (cited in Chalala, 1987: 27). This did not however imply Arab independence. The Arab caliph should only carry spiritual authority for the whole Islamic umma, whereas his temporal powers were limited to the province of Hijaz, which was to remain a part of the Ottoman Empire. The first open demand for secession of the Arabic-speaking areas in the Ottoman Empire did not arise until 1905, when Negib Azoury called for an Arab nation-state in which Muslims and Christians should be equal citizens under a secular constitutional regime, whose natural western boundary was Suez – as Egyptians were in his view part of the ‘African Berber family’ (Dawisha, 2003: 25). Azoury’s pan-Arabism, however, constituted only a minor current in an emergent Arab nationalist movement mostly limited to the urban elite of Damascus and Beirut. Its marginal appeal to the majority of the Arabic-speaking population and limited significance in regional politics is reflected in the so-called ‘Great Arab Revolt’ in 1916. While the classic Arab nationalist historiography presents this event as the patriotic spark igniting a region-wide Arab nationalist mass movement striving for Arab political unity, various historians have called attention to how Sharif Husayn in fact proclaimed his anti-Ottoman revolt ‘in the name of preserving Islam, not in the name of Arabism or the Arab nation’ and how it received only limited attention in other parts of the Arabic-speaking lands of the Ottoman Empire (Chalala, 1987: 28). Thus, in spite of this Arab awakening the regional world society was in terms of macro-identities mainly Islamic and the intra-regional relations were mostly based on Ottoman suzerainty, where quasi-independent





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Local Political Arabism and conservative pan-Arabism in a Coexistence Arab proto-interstate society (the interwar era) While the ‘greatness’ and ‘Arabness’ of the ‘Great Arab Revolt’ might be disputed, it is less contested that the First World War, of which it was part, brought about a transformation of the Middle East: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk’s abolition of the caliphate, the European mandate system and the foundation of new Arab territorial-states. Some of these new states – but not all (Harik, 1990) – were artificial constructions without much historical legacy and with borders cutting across existing communities making a poor fit between state and society. In this context marked by a confusion as to ‘who are we’ and ‘where do we belong’ and discussions on what principles a new regional order should be based, an awareness of being Arab and belonging to a distinct Arab nation was slowly gaining ground. Apart from providing a plausible alternative to the Islamic macro-identity of the Ottoman Empire (Ajami, 1978: 365), other factors also contributed to this development. Old family and tribal ties but also new trans-Arab processes connected Arabs across the newly erected borders. The expansion of educational opportunities, sometimes with teachers from other parts of the Arab world, the introduction of the radio and the proliferation of Arab newspapers contributed to the spread of Arab nationalist ideas and a sense of being part of a larger ‘imagined community’ of Arabs. The idea about the existence of a distinct Arab nation played an important role in the anti-colonial rhetoric. It served a demand for Arab independence and self-determination and provided at the same time a common denominator across religious, sectarian and tribal differences – except for Maghreb where Islam was playing this unifying role. An additional factor was the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. Partly thanks to the new media, the story about this revolt resonated throughout the Arab world contributing not only to the growth of popular Arab nationalist sentiments but also giving rise to a nascent solidarity among the new and weak Arab governments (Dawisha, 2003: 117). During the interwar years this growing Arab consciousness was reflected in width, in terms of a spread of Arab nationalist ideas beyond the Levant to include Egypt and then North Africa, and in depth, as reflected in the emergence of Arab nationalist parties and movements as well as in a range of congresses with participants from different Arab countries passing resolutions about Arab independence and



regional powers recognised the sultan’s position as caliph in the Ottoman Empire that at the same time was becoming a formal member of the European interstate society (Naff, 1984).

the defence of Palestine (Hourani, 1983: 292). Thus, without the Zionist immigration to Palestine, Arab nationalism may not have survived (Kienle, 1990: 8). In this way, the regional world society did attain an Arab dimension during the interwar years, where Arab nationalism also became more distinctly political. Arab identity was however neither the only nor the most important at that time. Many Arabic-speakers still classified themselves by religion, sect or genealogy, and identification with the territorial state (that is wataniyya) was gaining ground. This was most obvious in Egypt, where only Islam was able to challenge the dominance of Egyptian nationalist sentiments drawing on for instance Taha Husayn’s ideas about a distinct Egyptian civilisation (Dawisha, 2003: 101; see Hourani, 1983: Chapter 8). But even an artificial construct such as Syria also had its own Syrian nationalist movement led by Antun Saada (Dawisha, 2003: 96). As for the more politicised Arab nationalism, differences existed when it came to whether Arab self-determination and independence from foreign powers also implied Arab unity. In the view of the Hashemites the answer was affirmative. Contrary to Sharif Husayn, the instigator of the not so great or Arab Revolt, his sons were clearly influenced by Arab nationalist ideas in their aspirations for uniting Arabs under Hashemite rule reflecting a kind of conservative pan-Arabism. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Faisal formed in 1918 an ‘Arab government’ in Damascus. The following year he went to Versailles asking for recognition of the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia as independent sovereign peoples and that ‘no steps be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government’ (cited in Kramer, 1993: 178). In 1920, he was declared King of Greater Syria, but his kingdom-making claims to the entire Levant only lasted until he was deposed by the French three months later. As compensation, Faisal and ‘Abdallah were respectively entitled to rule the newly established Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq and the Emirate of Transjordan, from where they tried to promote various Arab unity schemes. During the 1940s Faisal proposed various ‘Fertile Crescent Unity’ plans as the first step towards a union of the Arabic-speaking world, and ‘Abdallah launched his ‘Greater Syria’ scheme based on a merger between Lebanon, Transjordan, Palestine and Syria and some kind of confederation with Iraq (Kienle, 1990: 9). None of these pan-Arabist visions of a kind of ‘confederative Arab interstate society’ were realised. This can partly be attributed to the weakness of the new states lacking the ability to project power regionally and to




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pressure from their British patrons on whom they were financially and militarily dependent. It was however also the result of an anti-Hashemite counter-alliance led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Their refusal of conservative pan-Arabism did not mean a rejection of Arab nationalism as such. Instead they were tapping into a ‘local’ Political Arabism. Here the outlook was more local and primarily part of an anti-colonialist struggle aimed at ending foreign rule and to gain self-determination for the Arabs, whereas a wider Arab unification was a secondary issue (Kienle, 1990: 7; Dawisha, 2003: 79). These young and fragile regimes were primarily concerned with their own survival and independence, but as a means to shore up domestic legitimacy they were tapping into the rhetoric about special bonds among Arabs and the defence of Palestine. In addition to numerous treaties of friendship during the 1930s, this was reflected in the first example of Arab states embarking on a cooperative effort to realise a ‘common Arab interest’. Before the 1939 Palestine Conference in London the Arab leaders met in Cairo to agree on a common Arab position, which they in fact adhered to throughout the whole (but inconclusive) conference (Dawisha, 2003: 116). Five years later, this recognition of a common ‘Arab interest’ gave rise to the Alexandria Protocol, which became the basis of the Arab League formally established in 1945 with the purpose of serving ‘the common good of all Arab countries’ by ‘cementing and reinforcing of their bonds’ and ‘coordinat[ing] their political activities’ (Charter of the Arab League, 1945; see Chapter 6). In the context of a regional world society with a growing Arab dimension in terms of identity and trans-Arab ties, now also including Egypt, the slowly emerging interstate society in the interwar years acquired a distinct Arab dimension resembling an Arab proto-interstate society, though it is important to keep in mind that it was still too early to speak about an actual society of fully independent Arab states. Despite the Hashemites’ more far-reaching conservative pan-Arabism, it was in the end more influenced by the ‘local’ Political Arabism placing it at the coexistence/cooperative position on the pluralist/solidarist spectrum. Rather than representing the first step towards a formal Arab unity, the first real Arab secondary institution, the Arab League, represented a reaction against such pan-Arab aspirations in favour of the respect for the global sovereignty master institution and its non-intervention derivative. Thus the League is according to its charter supposed to ‘safeguard [the] independence and sovereignty’ (Article 2) of its members, who ‘shall respect the form of government obtaining in the other States of the League’ and ‘pledge itself not to take action tending to change that form’ (Article 5/8).





Just as the First World War had a profound impact on the Arab world reflected in the emergence of new forms of Arab nationalism, the 1948 war following the proclamation of Israel also set in motion social and political transformations putting an end to some types of Arab nationalism (the Hashemites’ conservative pan-Arabism) and giving rise to others. The Arab divisions, jealousies and incompetence exposed by the defeat were not only delegitimising the already weak Arab regimes constituted by the traditional Arab elite. They also radicalised an emerging young, recently urbanised, educated and politically aware middle class. In a context where an identity as Arab was becoming a serious contender with regard to other loyalties, this class was calling for social and economic changes and for ‘true’ independence contrary to the ruling regimes’ de facto dependence on the former colonial powers. In the following decade this not only produced considerable political turbulence in the form of street demonstrations, riots and a series of (attempted) coups d’état putting an end to the Hashemite rule in Iraq and to the Egyptian and Syrian ancien régime. It also gave rise to a new form of Arab nationalism, where some of al-Husri’s pan-Arabist ideas were radicalised and given a socialist twist resulting in a revolutionary pan-Arabism championed by the fiery young officers coming to power. One of its two main expressions was the Ba’th movement founded in 1947 which spread from Damascus branches around the Arab world. Their goal was to resurrect (ba‘th) the glorious past of an ‘indivisible Arab nation’ by means of ‘unity, freedom and socialism’. More specifically, Arab unity in terms of a secular pan-Arab state comprising all Arabicspeaking areas, freedom from foreign imperialistic influence and Arab socialism which, contrary to Western Marxism, was more about state-led development than internal class struggle (Tibi, 1997: Chapter 11; see Kienle, 1990). From the mid-1950s, the Ba’th movement gained a growing presence in Arab politics. It played a key role in the transient merger of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic (UAR) lasting from 1958 to 1961 and in the subsequent even more ambitious but abortive attempt in 1963 to unite Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Yemen (see Chapter 6). While agreeing to the ultimate goal (resurrecting the Arab nation) and the overall means (unity, freedom and socialism), the two Ba’th regimes in power were however divided when it came to the specific strategy. Damascus saw a ‘Greater Syria’ as the natural first step towards unity, whereas Baghdad considered Iraq as an Arab Prussia destined to play the leading role in transforming the Arab Kulturnation into a real Staatnation.



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These internal divisions attained yet another dimension with the emergence of the so-called neo-Ba’thists in the mid-1960s stressing socialism more than nationalism. Hence, any unity plan should be preceded by a radical social and political revolution within the Arab societies making them more alike; in other words, the road to liberation of Jerusalem now went through revolutions in Damascus, Cairo and Amman (Owen, 2000: 70). While Ba’thism was more ideologically stringent, this revolutionary pan-Arabism found its most vibrant voice in Gamal Abdel Nasser. Notwithstanding his reputation of being Mr pan-Arabism himself, the coup d’état bringing him and his fellow ‘Free Officers’ to power was not informed by any elaborate Arab nationalist ideology. The initial concern was not to promote some larger Arab interest but to safeguard Egypt’s interests and independence from foreign interference (Chalala, 1987: 42; Dawisha, 2003: 138). After focusing in the beginning on internal political and economic reforms, his attention turned to the wider Arab world when Egypt was risking isolation by the British/US attempt to form an alliance of Middle Eastern states in terms of what in 1955 became the Baghdad Pact. Against this background, Nasser started to develop his ideas about the need for a collective Arab effort to counter what he considered as Western imperialist designs. This Nasserist doctrine took its points of departure in the assumption that the Arab world constituted a ‘pan-system’. Behind a façade of deviant and transient Arab territorial states with permeable and illusory frontiers, the Arabs constituted a single nation having common interests and security priorities distinct from those of the West (Heikal, 1978: 719; Khalidi, 1978: 695). The long-term goal would therefore be to unite the Arabs in a single Arab nation-state and until then to create a distinctly Arab security system based on the interest of the Arab nation. Behaviour should therefore be informed by a raison de la nation Arabe rather than a narrow raison d’état. Hence, Nasser’s demand for conformity and commitment to ‘Arab core issues’ such as the rejection of Western domination, the defence of Palestine, the desirability of Arab unity and the expectation that Arabs should act in concert. As it was, according to Nasser (1955: 87–8), a time when the Arab world was ‘in search of a hero and the role had settled upon Egypt’, the Egyptian president assumed a special position. Nasser claimed a moral right to act on behalf of the Arab nation even if this implied interference in the internal affairs of other Arab territorial states (Sirriyeh, 2000). During the 1950–60s, these revolutionary pan-Arabism(s) found a ready and receptive audience among the Arab populations. Besides its material capabilities, Egypt also held the leading intellectual/cultural




position in the Arab world making it into a ‘cultural hegemon’ with much ‘soft power’. Nasser himself was a charismatic personality and owing to the information revolution in terms of the transistor radio his speeches at Sawt al-Arab resonated throughout the Arab world society. Within this ‘Arab sound chamber’ new social groups identifying themselves as Arabs and craving for change were receptive to his anti-imperialist, revisionist and socialist vision and fascinated by his initially successful foreign policy dispositions relating to the rejection of the Baghdad Pact, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the rebuttal of the subsequent British/French/Israeli attack and the formation of the UAR. Most of the Arab regimes did not share this enthusiasm about Nasserism, which they rightly saw as an existential threat to their own rule. Instead of rejecting Arab nationalism as such, monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia tried to promote an alternative variant. As an undercurrent in the Arab nationalisms of the 1950–60s, it is thus also possible to identify a conservative Political Arabism sharing the commitment to ‘the Arab cause’ and concern for Palestine, but on the basis of the sovereignty of the Arab states and within the framework of an ArabIslamic identity constituting an ‘indigenous’ alternative to being either an artificial Western proxy or Arab revolutionary. In spite of this alternative version, the predominantly Arab nationalist current in these years was revolutionary pan-Arabism and while its confederative aspirations were never realised, the Arab interstate society did nevertheless move towards the solidarist end of the spectrum. Thus, it was carrying a number of similarities with the convergence type of an interstate society embedded within a now predominantly Arab world society. In line with the general expectations of a convergence interstate society (Buzan, 2004: 147, 160, 194), inter-Arab relations were marked by a deep-seated ‘we-feeling’ and a substantial degree of convergence in the norms, rules, institutions and goals of the concerned states just as they involved an acceptance of responsibility for other members and a demand for domestic conformity. As expected, this Arab regional international society was at odds with some of the master institutions of global international society. This is most obvious when it comes to the sovereignty institution, as reflected in the frequent interferences in domestic affairs, but it is to some extent also the case for an institution such as war, as reflected in the absence of clashes between Arab armies. As regards the nationalism institution, it was important but in its own distinct way owing to the misfit between state and nation. At the same time, the Arab interstate relations also differed from the standard example of a convergent interstate society, the




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EU. While the latter is a rather weak ‘community’ in terms of identity, but a strong ‘society’ in terms of institutions, the reverse was the case for this Arab interstate society. The absence of inter-Arab ‘hot’ wars did not secure the European ‘Kantian’ peacefulness, as Arab politics of the 1950– 60s resembled what Malcolm Kerr (1965) famously labelled as an ‘Arab Cold War’. While the nature and theatre of rivalry as well as its means and basic cleavages differed qualitatively from what is found in a powerpolitical interstate society, its existential implications for the individual Arab regimes were no less dramatic, as often stressed in the accounts by IR/Middle East studies scholars referred to earlier on how inter-Arab relations differ in kind from international relations elsewhere.

Intergovernmental Political Arabism in a cooperative Arab interstate society (the 1970s) While most agree that revolutionary pan-Arabism by the late 1960s was a spent force, the further implication of this has been much more contested. Following Fouad Ajami (1978) and the large ‘Rise and Fall’ literature, the 1967 debacle not only brought détente to the Arab Cold War but also marked the beginning of the end of Arab nationalism as such so that it no longer made sense to speak of a distinct Arab international society. A common identity or special bonds among Arabic-speakers would no longer influence regional politics, and Arab public opinion and non-state actors would be without relevance. ‘Post-Arab’ regional politics was instead expected to evolve into what Ajami (1978: 355) described as a ‘normal state system’, in which foreign policy is set apart from domestic politics and based on a narrow raison d’état. In other words, regional politics would no longer differ from the global international society. At first sight a brief examination of the 1970s supports this view of a divided Arab world ceasing to be Arab and with steadily consolidating states ignoring previous concerns for the raison de la nation Arabe. While King Hussein for fear of the consequences of being perceived as ‘un-Arabic’ took part in the fatal 1967 war, a few years later the PLO was forced to leave Jordan after the Jordanian army crushed Palestinian guerrillas during the brief but violent ‘Black September’ civil war in 1970. As for the initially quite successful joint Syrian–Egyptian attack on Israel in October 1973, what may appear as yet another Arab attempt at ‘liberating Palestine’ turned out primarily to be about regaining own lost territory, and as for the Palestinians the 1970s witnessed the emergence of a more distinct Palestinian nationalism. Besides the fall of revolutionary pan-Arabism, these developments are also related to the increasing state




capacity in terms of infrastructural power reflected in a growing ability to control and insulate the society making the regimes less susceptible to trans-Arab pressures (Gause, 1992). While Nasser had been able to wage a trans-Arab ‘radio war’, the Arab states in the 1970s – partly owing to their new petrodollars-enabled omnipotence – controlled the media to the point, as Lynch notes (2006b: 37; cf. Kandil, 1988), where little real public sphere remained, either within the individual states or at the trans-Arab level. Paradoxically, the oil-boom also constituted the point of departure for those who argue that the 1967 war only marked yet another transformation of Arab nationalism. Thus, the oil-boom gave rise to new forms of social and economic interconnectedness in the Arab world. Movements of labour were flowing from less well-off Arab countries with a labour surplus to the wealthy oil-producing Arab countries. At the same time, flows of capital went in the opposite direction in terms of remittances, investments and aid (Kerr and El-Sayed, 1982). This circulation not only gave rise to ‘some of the strongest economic links of any regional system of developing states’ (Noble, 1999: 81), but also to exchanges of ideas, values and habits breeding a sense of belonging to a larger Arab community. The same year Ajami declared the ‘end of pan-Arabism’, 78 per cent of the respondents in a survey throughout the Arab world stated that the Arabs constituted a single nation and 53 per cent also believed the state boundaries were artificial and the vast majority supported the establishment of some sort of decentralised Arab nation-state (Hinnebusch, 2003: 59). Against this background, it still made sense to speak of an Arab world society, although other identities were also on the rise, including territorial state identities, that is wataniyya, and Islam, which experienced a revival as a supra-state identity in these years. Contrary to the preceding decades, these social and economic links among Arabs did not translate into some radical confederative pan-Arab visions, and, except for Muammar al-Qadhafi’s insignificant attempt to take up the mantle of Nasser by calling for a unity between Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, large unity-schemes almost disappeared from the Arab agenda. Arab nationalism was however not limited to a weak apolitical Cultural Arabism just as the interstate society was not post-Arab. The 1970s saw instead the rise of a kind of intergovernmental Political Arabism, where Arab nationalist rhetoric was now employed in the service of the status quo as it permitted the Arab regimes to exploit some of the possibilities inherent in Arab nationalism without surrendering control of their own policy (Gause, 1992: 453; Owen, 2000: 71). This was reflected in an Arab interstate




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society resembling the cooperative type, which is marked by elaborate criteria for membership, some kind of solidarist joint project and a fairly rich collection of secondary institutions (Buzan, 2004: 193). The rich Arab states used some of their oil revenues to fund a large number of new Arab secondary institutions – in fact more Arab I(N)GOs than ever before were in existence in the 1970s (Hourani, 2002: 423) – and to support the less well-off frontline states in the Palestine conflict, which still held an important position in the politics of legitimacy in the Arab world. By virtue of its new prominent role in the leadership of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia thus began to give Palestine high priority as reflected in its use of the ‘oil weapon’ in 1973 (Kazziha, 1988). In comparison to more solidarist types, a cooperative interstate society is marked by a larger acceptance of global master institutions such as sovereignty, territoriality and diplomacy. In the Arab case the change towards a more cooperative order was already clear at the Khartoum Arab Summit in 1967, which besides the famous ‘three no’s’ also confirmed that inter-Arab relations must be based on the respect for a kind of ‘qualified sovereignty’ (Sirriyeh, 2000: 57; Hinnebusch, 2003: 176). Moves for unity and demands for domestic convergence sometimes accompanied by illicit attempts at meddling in domestic politics thus gave way to Arab co-ordination on an intergovernmental basis, where conventional diplomatic instruments of statecraft gained a new prominence (Gause, 1992: 454). When Syria in 1976 was interfering in the Lebanese civil war, it was for instance with a mandate as an Arab peacekeeping force passed at one of the frequent Arab summits – which was supposed to constitute a mechanism within the Arab League to safeguard the common Arab interest without questioning the legitimacy of the individual state (Hinnebusch, 2003: 176). Owing to a growing acceptance of domestic diversity, illustrated by Sadat’s encouragement of cooperation among Arab states regardless of regime type (Gause, 1992: 454), the tension of the Arab Cold War gave way to an inter-Arab détente reflected in a temporary Arab Concert of past opponents: the former Nasserist Egypt, Ba’thist Syria and conservative Saudi Arabia.

Weak Political Arabism in a coexistence/power political Arab interstate society (late twentieth century) Sadat’s decision to ignore some of the core Arab norms by breaking unity of ranks and make a separate peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978–79 provided the final blow to an already increasingly discordant Arab concert. Again, Arab nationalism was pronounced as




dead and an Arab international society a thing of the past. During the last decades of the twentieth century, a number of events support this claim about Arab politics ceasing to be distinctly Arab. Apart from the Camp David Accords, there was the lack of Arab response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 directed specifically at the symbol of the Arab nation, the Palestinians (Chalala, 1987: 47). At the same time, Ba’thist Syria chose to ally with non-Arab Iran against Ba’thist Iraq. In August 1990 Saddam Hussein broke yet another core Arab norm by letting Iraqi tanks cross the border into Kuwait, marking the first ever example of an Arab state invading and occupying another Arab state. The Arab League was paralysed, unable to provide ‘an Arab solution’, and in the following Gulf War not only pro-US Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt but also Syria joined the US-led alliance against another Arab state. Against this background, a number of observers concluded that if Arab nationalism was not already dead, Saddam Hussein had provided the final coup de grâce (Faksh, 1993). A brief look at the 1990s lends further support to this picture. Following the example of Egypt, the Palestinians and Jordan made separate agreements with Israel and, in parallel with the Middle East peace process, visions about a ‘new Middle East’ were promoted, whereas Arab policy-makers’ references to a raison de la nation Arabe became more sparse (Bilgin, 2004: 116; see Ibrahim, 1996). The paralysis of the Arab League was reflected in the lack of Arab summits between 1990 and 1996, and the Damascus Declaration – an attempt at creating a postKuwait War Arab security framework embracing Egypt, Syria and the Gulf states (see Chapter 6) – turned out to be a dead-letter (Sirriyeh, 2000). Instead a number of new subregional secondary institutions emerged in the Gulf (GCC) and the Maghreb (AMU), whereas a similar project (ACC) in the Levant, the classic Arab core, was stillborn (see Chapter 6). The degree of Arab social/economic interconnectedness related to capital/labour circulations was reduced following the declining oil prices in the mid-1980s and the Kuwait/Gulf War, when Palestinian migrant workers were expelled from the Gulf. While loyalty to the individual territorial state was still contested, the Arab populations’ identification went increasingly either to smaller substate communities, for example sect, clan, family, or to a larger Islamic supra-state identity, which the Iranian revolution in particular brought back into the limelight. Some Arab traits in Arab politics can nevertheless still be traced in terms of a weak Political Arabism. Thus, the Camp David Accords caused a joint response from the other Arab states. Egypt was expelled from




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the Arab League (until 1989) and the frontline states’ rejection of Camp David was financially rewarded. Notwithstanding that Saddam Hussein was of no less concern to the Gulf states than the Islamic Republic, the majority of the Arab states also chose to side with Iraq against Iran. As Hussein Sirriyeh (2000: 61) observes, even the shocking Iraqi invasion of Kuwait did not bring the Gulf states to abandon Political Arabism as such. They were still committed to operating within an Arab framework, providing it was more flexible and based on the respect for the full sovereignty and independence of the individual states. The Kuwait War likewise leaves a more complex picture. Saddam Hussein’s attempt at legitimising Iraq’s invasion as an act of Arab unification intended for the redistribution of oil wealth among all Arabs instead of to corrupt pro-Western rulers fell on deaf ears among most of the Arab regimes, but carried much more resonance at the popular level. According to Asad AbuKhalil (1992), the conflict brought to the surface an emotional unity among Arabs leading him to suggest that the Arab division was primarily between Arab regimes and their populations disillusioned with the Arab status quo and the regimes in power. The Arab popular reactions may have been more varied than suggested by AbuKhalil (cf. Kramer, 1993). It is nevertheless worthwhile noticing that the few Arab states that took a costly ambiguous neutral/pro-Iraqi position, such as Jordan and Yemen, were in the midst of political liberalisations making these regimes more susceptible to popular opinion compared to other Arab regimes (Brand, 2001). A similar pattern, where non-state actors continue to locate themselves within an Arab nationalist framework, can also be recognised in the dismissive popular reactions to the peace process and the ‘new Middle East framework’ (Bilgin, 2004: 128). Also after Camp David, it made sense to speak of an Arab international society. The world society in the last decades of the twentieth century was still holding an important Arab dimension, although thinner and challenged by other identities. The interstate society was likewise still informed by the notion about an Arab nation, but the relations between the Arab states were no longer based on a qualified sovereignty, so in case of a conflict between a raison d’état and a raison de la nation Arabe the former would usually take precedence. Thus, the Arab interstate society had become more pluralist, resembling a coexistence type of society sometimes turning towards the power-political side (Buzan, 2004: 190–2) as reflected in the increasing militarisation, open warfare between Arabs and alliance-makings with non-Arabs regardless of popular opinion.





This exploration of the Arabness in Arab politics suggests so far that Arab nationalism on the one hand has proven much more obstinate than often claimed. On the other hand, its transformations have generated a variety of Arab interstate societies during the twentieth century. Thus, the notion about an Arab international society is neither limited nor identical to Arab politics of the 1950–60s. At the same time, the Arab interstate society appears to have become less distinctly Arab but in increasing conformity with the Westphalian elements of the global interstate society. This poses the question of whether Arab nationalism was only a thing of the past century, without any contemporary relevance, leaving regional dynamics as post-Arab either resembling Ajami’s ‘normal’ international society or some distinct but non-Arab regional principles. A number of scholars have with reference to the first two major Middle Eastern conflicts in the new millennium answered in the affirmative. Referring to the lack of a united Arab position on the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the Arab states acted separately and some joined the US alliance, Eyal Zisser (2006: 688) claims that the Arab world does not really exist. It is nothing but a mirage without any relevance to contemporary regional politics, and Robert Satloff (2005) therefore recommends that the very notion about an ‘Arab world’ be banished from the diplomatic lexicon. Asher Susser (2006) argues in a similar way that the symbolic clash during the 2006 Summer War, where three ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ states at variance with all the classic Arab nationalist norms criticised the Shi‘i Hizbullah’s rather successful – but costly – challenge to Israel, proved that Arab nationalism has been replaced by sectarian schisms within Islam, as Vali Nasr (2007) has put it. Recalling the introduction to this chapter, a closer look beyond the, at first sight, quite post-Arab interstate domain reveals a more complex picture of the Summer War. Among the Arab populations and nonstate actors, it was difficult to detect any distinct Shi‘i/Sunni divide and the popular debate was even more noticeably framed within an Arab nationalist narrative, which Hizbullah also tapped into. Considering its remarkable obstinacy, these traits of the Summer War suggest that Arab nationalism instead of being obsolete might once again experience a transformation leaving the Arab dimension in Arab politics best captured within the Arab world society domain and among non-state actors. This is exactly the point of departure of Marc Lynch’s (2006b) reflections about a ‘new Arab Public Sphere’ and Shibley Telhami’s (1999;



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see Telhami and Barnett, 2002) discussion about a ‘new Arabism’. In combination, they constitute a very useful point of departure for an outline of what may be labelled as a new non-statist Political Arabism located in an Arab-Islamic world society. The emergence of such a new and transformed form of Arab nationalism is related to two intertwined dynamics. The first concerns the prevalent authoritarianism in the Arab world leaving very narrow limits for free political deliberations within a local public sphere. Instead discontented citizens are turning their attention to the regional level using it as an indirect and less dangerous way of criticising the regimes in power. They raise the classic Arab nationalist question about Palestine, or the issue about Iraqis’ suffering which emerged on the Arab agenda with the 1990s UN-sanctions regime, as an indirect and less dangerous way of criticising the sorry Arab political status quo. This intertwining of regional and domestic issues is not new, but it attains a new dimension by a second dynamic that is related to the 1990s information revolution. The emergence of new trans-Arab media thus challenges the aforementioned almost total control over the media gained by the local regimes in the decades following the Nasserist ‘radio wars’. The epoch-making event is of course the launching in 1996 of al Jazeera, which provides the perfect platform for a political deliberation revolving around regional issues. Contrary to previous Arab satellite channels, al Jazeera emphasises news and political debate and as a commercial channel it is concerned with reaching the largest possible market in terms of audience in the Arabic-speaking world. It therefore stresses matters with a common Arab interest such as Iraq or Palestine or presents local issues within a broader Arab framework, so that Egyptian sweeps against the Muslim Brotherhood become expressions of the absence of Arab democracy. By tying distant events together in a common Arab narrative and uniting Arabs within the same virtual space, the new trans-Arab media have according to Lynch paved the way for what he labels as a distinct new Arab public sphere, which is equivalent to the ‘world society’ domain. It is united by a common Arab language and a news agenda revolving around ‘Arab issues’ and marked by a shared collective identity through which speakers and listeners conceive themselves as taking part in a single, common political project – pretty much what EU enthusiasts can only dream of (Lynch, 2006b: 22, 32). In Arab opinion polls large majorities thus rank the Palestine issue as one of the most important political issues to them personally, and following Peter Furia and Russell Lucas (2006) Arabs still evaluate non-Arab countries based on




those countries’ policies towards key regional Arab issues, that is Palestine and Iraq, rather than their specific behaviour towards their own country. If today’s Arab world society partly owing to the new trans-Arab media resembles an identity-bounded enclave, internally open but externally opaque as suggested by Lynch, it is natural to draw comparisons with the 1950–60s Arab ‘sound chamber’ in which information, ideas and opinions resonated with little regard for state frontiers. While trans-Arab media were also playing an important role at that time, a comparison between Nasser’s Sawt al-Arab and today’s al Jazeera will highlight some of the distinct features of the current Arab world society and the nature of the new form of Arab nationalism: while Sawt al-Arab was an ideological tool wielded by a regional great power, al Jazeera is a commercial, quasi-independent station driven by market demand and based in tiny Qatar. Moreover, Nasser’s ‘one-way’ radio speeches were based on a monological principle – not only in concrete terms but also in a more figurative sense as his revolutionary pan-Arabism assumed unity and binding consensus among Arabs leaving little space for open deliberations and legitimate disagreements, whereas al Jazeera is much more dialogical in nature. The dialogue is found in the audience polls and in the possibility for the viewers to call in asking questions or expressing their opinions, but also in programmes such as the highly popular political talk show al-Ittijah al-Muakis (‘The Opposite Direction’), where guests debate commonly accepted ‘Arab issues’. The prominence on al Jazeera of the Egyptian Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi hosting the popular programme al-Shari‘a wa’l-Haya (‘Shari‘a and Life’) illustrates a final important difference: the growing Islamic dimension in today’s Arab identity contrary to the secular pan-Arabism of the 1950–60s. Thus, what we may be witnessing is an Arab nationalism embedded in a world society with an Arab-Islamic identity as the common reference point and united around a common political agenda defining certain issues as something any Arab must take a stand on. However, contrary to the past it is more an agreement on what to disagree about, because no definitive answer as to what ‘the Arab position’ is on a given issue is provided or assumed. According to polls, an agreement about the paramount importance of the Palestine issue by no means equals a consensus about the preferred solution (Telhami, 2007a), and while Arabs state that watching Arab television makes them feel closer to Arabs elsewhere, they feel at the same time that differences between Arabs are growing (Lynch, 2006b: 4).





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Despite the frequent announcements of the death of Arab nationalism, it is still possible in the twenty-first century to identify special bonds between Arabic-speaking peoples considering themselves to be part of the same Arab nation. In view of its largely non-statist nature, the huge role ascribed to popular media, the lack of definitive and agreed-upon ‘Arab answers’ and its presence primarily within the Arab-Islamic world society rather than the interstate domain, the labelling of this transformed Arab nationalism as a non-statist Political Arabism might come as a surprise. At first sight, it would be tempting to regard it as an example of Cultural Arabism without any political impact or relevance to the contemporary regional constellation. Although the initial official Arab reactions to Hizbullah’s cross-border raid and the ensuing Israeli bombardment of Lebanon seems to support this view, this dimension of the Summer War illustrates how Arab politics still holds a distinct Arab dimension with implications also for the interstate domain. Drawing on some of the above reflections on the emergence of a new form of Arab nationalism, these regional reactions can thus be perceived as part of a New Arab Cold War marked by similarities with, but also differences from, the 1950–60s. Besides the explicit equation made at demonstrations between ‘Nasrallah 2006’ and ‘Nasser 1956’, the new Arab Cold War is like the old one primarily symbolic – or ‘cold’. Both are likewise marked by a complex interplay between domestic and regional theatres and are about monopolising the meaning of the ‘common Arab interest’ and discrediting the adversary’s Arab credentials. At variance with the usual emphasis on its Shi‘i nature, Hizbullah was very keen on and successful in presenting itself as an Arab movement concerned about Arab solidarity, the security of the Arab nation, resistance to occupation, the liberation of Palestine and the struggle against imperialism (Fuller, 2006). Although Saudi Arabia’s, Egypt’s and Jordan’s denunciations of Hizbullah are often presented as proof of their post-Arab nature, a closer look at how and why these regimes launched their critique reveals another picture. Their charge against Hizbullah of ‘adventurism’ was for instance substantiated with reference to how the actions did ‘not serve Arab interests’. A likely explanation as to why they were so explicit in their critique is a general fear among authoritarian Arab regimes of Arab-Islamic non-state movements largely beyond their control and championing issues holding great popular resonance. From this perspective, Hizbullah’s challenge to Israel under Arab-Islamic colours presented an indirect threat to the regimes, but also an opportunity. On



4 The Summer War 2006 as a New Arab Cold War3

the one hand, by acting rather than simply talking about the ‘Arab cause’, Hizbullah exposed the hollowness of the Arab regimes’ own promises. But, on the other hand, the head-on clash with Israel’s military superiority held out the possibility that – in the case of a swift Israeli victory – Hizbullah would be cut down to size, literally and figuratively. Thus, the ‘moderate Sunni Arab states’ seem to have reacted to the Summer War in terms not that distant from the old Arab Cold War, namely in attempting to discredit a rival with accusations of harming ‘the Arab interest’ and in being sensitive to the interrelation of Arab regional issues and (a lack of) domestic legitimacy. Another reflection of the regimes’ sensitivity to Arab public opinion was their abrupt change of course as the civilian casualties of Israeli bombings rose in the full glare of the cameras of al Jazeera. The three pro-Western Sunni Arab states began distancing themselves – at least rhetorically – from the US and Israel, and instead tried to raise their Arab profiles by sending humanitarian aid to the Lebanese victims of what now was termed as ‘Israeli aggression’. In the aftermath of the war, they have furthermore been very keen on recapturing the Palestine torch from Arab-Islamic non-state actors. This is reflected in the Saudi Arabian mediating role for a Palestinian national unity government; the reintroduction of the Saudi-initiated Arab Peace Initiative presented to Israel by Egypt and Jordan and their attempt at co-ordinating an Arab position at the 2007 Annapolis meeting. An obvious objection to this framing is the close links between Hizbullah and Iran. At first glance, this non-Arab dimension highlights the difference from the 1950–60s as one of the key players now is neither Arab nor post-Arab. But Iran’s attempts to gain influence in the Arab world may still fit into a New Arab Cold War as non-Arab Iran does so by tapping into a classic Arab nationalist narrative, sometimes even at al Jazeera, presenting itself, apparently rather successfully, as more Arab than the Arabs when it comes to the Palestine question. Contrary to the frequent anti-Iranian remarks made by ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ leaders, the controversial Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came in second in Egyptian post-war polls about the identity of ‘the most important leader in the region’. Only Nasrallah surpassed him, and another ArabIslamist leader, Khalid Mishal of Hamas, followed close on his heels. Just as noteworthy, this profile did not gain the Iranian president much credit among his own population, which does not belong to the Arab world society. In spite of Iran’s new presence, Palestine in other words still appears to be more an asset in an Arab than a broader Islamic Cold War. It is however not only Iran’s new role as a player in the Arab game of politics which makes it necessary to speak of a New Arab Cold War.




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While depicting ‘Nasser 1956’ alongside ‘Nasrallah 2006’ is intended to establish similarities between the two figures, at the same time the comparison aptly illustrates the differences between then and now. Whereas in the 1950s the ‘radical’ torchbearer was the secular, socialist-leaning president of a leading regional power, during the Summer War the head of an Islamist non-state movement was hailed as ‘the only true Arab leader today’. In other words, an independent and more popularly driven Political Arabism rising from the Arab-Islamic world society rather than a state-led pan-Arabism now constitutes the dominant frame of reference within the Arab international society. Moreover, not only are relations between key players transformed – Egypt and Saudi Arabia have turned from adversaries into allies, for instance – but the nature of actors has also changed. Non-state actors, not upstart republics, now represent the ‘radical’ challenge and the rivalry is thus not any longer primarily an interstate competition, but a cold war between Arab states, or regimes, and non-state actors holding considerable popular support. These nonstate actors are Islamists. Hence the final difference: the basic challenge to the present interstate order is not secular, revolutionary pan-Arabism, but a ‘transnational Islamo-Arabic order’. Thus, while the Summer War might in some senses mark the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, it also resembles an ‘older’ Middle East, and the inter-Arab dimension to the conflict shows how it is premature to banish the ‘Arab world’ from our diplomatic lexicon and declare an Arab international society as obsolete.

5 Conclusions As already outlined in the introduction, the two major points of this chapter are, first, that it makes sense to perceive inter-Arab relations in terms of a number of sub-global Arab international societies. Second, that Arab nationalism has proved much more resilient than usually claimed as reflected in its many transformations, most recently in terms of a nonstatist Political Arabism. Apart from that, it is also possible to point to a few more general lessons from this engagement of the new English school and Middle East (studies) in a dialogue on Arab nationalism(s). First, the English school appears very useful for an integration of insights from IR and Middle East studies. At least part of IR has a long tradition for emphasising the role of conflict and anarchy in international relations, often on the basis of materialist assumptions which exclude ‘society’. In turn, parts of Middle East studies have been very much aware of the role




of a common Arab identity, but sometimes at the expense of attention to the states and the logic of anarchy. Owing to the English school’s notion about the ‘anarchical society’, the English school constitutes a valuable alternative way of grasping how inter-Arab relations are marked by conflict as well as shared identities and norms about ‘appropriate’ Arab behaviour. This observation can also be found among (some of) IR’s constructivists (Barnett, 1998) underscoring the often-made point on the similarities between these two traditions despite their different point of departure (Dunne, 1995). A second important potential merit of the new English school in particular, is the prospect of ‘bringing the Middle East back into the Social Sciences’ by means of providing tools to grasp in a general language some of the particular traits making the Middle East into a distinct regional international society. The new English school’s larger sensitivity to diversity and various contexts is well equipped to grasp some of the traits of Middle East international relations that differ from the European or global patterns, on which much classic English school is based. At the same time, it provides a tool to bring the study of the Middle East out of that ghetto, within which has prevailed a kind of ‘regional narcissism’ among Middle East scholars lacking a general language either to compare their own insights with other parts of the globe or to make them comprehensible to non-Middle East specialists (Valbjørn, 2004b). Finally, the study of the transformations of Arab nationalisms also holds a number of lessons for the new English school. It confirms the usefulness of making a distinction between global and regional international societies and between different forms of interstate societies as well as of broadening the perspective beyond the narrow interstate domain by paying attention to the world society domain. It also provides insights into how the strength of the sovereignty master institution differs in time and space depending on the nature of the regional interstate society; how the acceptance as a global master institution of nationalism might carry completely different implications in case of a misfit between state/nation; how a strong regional international society does not necessarily carry any universalistic intentions, and how a solidarist international society does not have to imply Kantian peacefulness similar to EU as it can also be marked by a ‘cold war’ played out between the domestic and regional levels.

Notes 1. For helpful comments and criticism on various ideas expressed in this chapter I wish to thank André Bank, Barry Buzan, Ray Hinnebusch, Lars Erslev Andersen




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and colleagues in the IR-section at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. 2. In view of the conceptual confusion it is hardly surprising that the present use of the terms ‘Arab nationalism’, ‘Pan-Arabism’ and ‘Arabism’ is not identical to the way these terms are employed in other contexts, cf. Khalidi (1991); Dawisha (2003); Kienle (1990); Barnett (1998); Sirriyeh (2000). 3. This section draws on Valbjørn and Bank (2007) and my contribution in Andersen, Hove and Valbjørn (2007). The argument on how the Summer War can be perceived in the context of a New Arab Cold War is primarily meant as an alternative reading to the prevalent view that the conflict was reflecting a new sectarian Shi‘i/Sunni divide in a post-Arab Middle East. This does not imply that the conflict was not marked by other dimensions than an Arab one. Lars Erslev Andersen, Søren Hove and I thus suggest that the conflict in some senses condensed three different forms of Cold Wars.




8 Sohail H. Hashmi

Introduction1 Pan-Islam is an ideology calling for the unity of Muslim peoples worldwide on the basis of their shared Islamic identity. Apart from this basic definition, pan-Islam, historically and today, is characterised by great diversity of motives, goals and tactics. It ranges from what we could call solidarist visions at one end of the spectrum to pluralist visions at the other. Solidarist notions of pan-Islam themselves find myriad expressions. Some appeal to idealised versions of Islamic history, calling for the ‘reconstituting’ of the caliphate, one that politically unites most Muslims in a single state, a ‘new’ dar al-islam. Others envisage pan-Islamic solidarity in cosmopolitan terms, creating a community of individual Muslims linked through transnational, rather than intergovernmental, institutions. According to this vision, the umma has a life apart from the state or states. At the pluralist end of the spectrum, pan-Islam accommodates itself to the realities of a politically divided dar al-islam and a polyglot umma. Here, pan-Islam finds expression in internationalist terms, as an interstate society of Muslim states that is a subset of the universal international society. All member states are in good standing with the universal international society and abide by its constitutive principles in their relations with each other and with non-Muslim states. But the pan-Islamic ideals come into play in special obligations and claims that Muslim states have in relation to one another. The Middle East has figured importantly in all pan-Islamic schemes because of sacred geography and historical memory. Islam’s holiest sites – Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem – are located in the region, as are the capitals of the early caliphate – Medina, Damascus and Baghdad. Istanbul was not only the seat of the Ottoman Empire and the embodiment 170



Islam, the Middle East and the Pan-Islamic Movement

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of Islamic political power for nearly 500 years, it was also envisaged by many Muslims as the epicentre for the propagation of pan-Islam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pan-Islam, one could argue, is devoid of its emotive core if it does not to some extent include the Middle East in it. Yet over the past century, pan-Islam has not been a major ideological force in Middle East politics, nor have Middle Easterners generally been its leading proponents. After the flurry of pan-Islamic agitation centring on the fate of the caliphate in the years immediately before and after the First World War, the Middle East receded in importance in panIslamic politics. Ethnic nationalism rather than pan-Islam proved the more potent and contentious ideology in the region. The Turks firmly renounced any claims to Islamic leadership under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and set about creating a secular Turkish Republic. The Iranians, as Shi‘i Muslims, were disadvantaged in asserting pan-Islamic leadership, and, under the two Pahlavi shahs, they had no desire to do so. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s efforts to disseminate its revolutionary zeal abroad were derailed by the devastating Iran–Iraq War. As for the Arabs, the secular ideology of pan-Arabism proved the dominant challenge to the emerging Arab states, with pan-Islam taking a decidedly secondary role to it. Pan-Arabism and pan-Islam always existed in ambivalent tension with each other, sometimes reconciled, sometimes at odds. The political and military weakness of the Arab states, so graphically demonstrated by their repeated losses to Israel, belied not only pan-Arab claims to unity and strength, but also Arab assertions to primacy in the Muslim world. At the same time, however, the demise of pan-Arabism following the Six Day War of 1967 opened the way for a reassertion of pan-Islamic sentiments as one component of the general Islamic resurgence of the 1970s. The Middle East, thanks in large part to the vast oil wealth of the Gulf Arab states, became once again a base for the generation and propagation of pan-Islamic ideals and activity. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is but the most prominent manifestation of the various expressions pan-Islam has taken during the past 40 years. This chapter explores the historical evolution and current significance of pan-Islam to the regional politics of the Middle East. Pan-Islam here is understood broadly, encompassing both solidarist and pluralist visions, as outlined above, which find expression in interstate, transnational and interhuman domains. This chapter analyses the multiple roles Islam plays in creating, sustaining or undermining the primary and secondary institutions of the region. More broadly, this chapter asks the question




172 Sohail H. Hashmi

1 The Middle East in early pan-Islam In tracing the origins of pan-Islam, one has to differentiate between the ethical ideal and the political ideology of a united community of Muslims. The former is ancient; indeed, it is grounded in the Qur’an and the traditions (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad. The latter is modern, dating to the late nineteenth century. Both, however, are ambiguous in their prescriptions for the type of Muslim unity that is required, desirable or possible. Both could be and have been understood as requiring either solidarist or pluralist forms of Muslim unity. Most histories of pan-Islam dispense with its ethical foundations in the Qur’an and sunna (‘the way’) of the Prophet, focusing almost exclusively on its modern, ideological manifestation. But much of the ideological content of modern pan-Islam derives from ethical norms that go deep in Islamic faith and history, and no attempt to understand the contemporary force of pan-Islamic aspirations can succeed without this historical background. Muslim unity in early Islam: ideals and realities Islamic political theory of the classical period, dating from roughly the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, treats the unity of Muslims under three concepts: umma, dar al-islam and khilafa. Umma is the only one of the three whose usage in political theory derives from the Qur’an and traditions of the Prophet. In the Qur’an, umma generally conveys the sense of a moral or religious community. All human beings began as a single umma but divided over time into many ummas as God sent prophets calling them to ‘serve God and eschew evil’ (2:213, 10:19, 16:36). Muhammad is the last of a long line of divine messengers, all of whom constitute a single umma in their own right because they each brought to their communities the same essential message (21:92, 23:52). Following the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 (the Hijra), when the Muslim community acquired social and political cohesion, the Qur’an begins to address the unity and purpose of the Muslim umma. The Muslims are a middle community (umma wassat) because they avoid sectarian extremes and witness true monotheism (2:143). They are the best community (khaira umma) because they ‘enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong’ (3:110). Both of these characterisations of



of whether Islamic identities and institutions enhance or weaken the emergence of a sub-global society within the geographical and cultural boundaries of the Middle East.

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the Muslim community are normative, not descriptive. They are a challenge to the Muslims not to stray from the right path as the majority of people in earlier ummas had done. If they do so, God will ‘substitute in [their] place another people’ (47:38). The Qur’an lays down another challenge to the Muslim umma: stay united. The clearest admonition comes in Q. 3:103: ‘Hold fast altogether to the rope that God extends to you, and be not divided. Recall God’s blessings upon you: You were enemies and he reconciled your hearts. By his grace, you became brethren. You were at the brink of a pit of fire, and he saved you from it.’ Most commentators on this verse understand the ‘rope’ (habl) to mean the Qur’an specifically or Islam generally, which God, out of compassion and mercy, has sent as a lifeline to human beings. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) considered the verse’s broader lesson for the Muslim umma to be that God forbids first, ‘divisiveness in religion. This is because truth can only be one, and all else is folly and error’; second, ‘enmity and rancor, because Muslims in pre-Islamic times were given to hostility and war. Thus God had forbidden them to engage in such acts’; third, ‘anything that may cause disunity and hence remove amity and reconciliation’ (Ayoub, 1992: 279). Al-Razi, like most exegetes, emphasises the first lesson, the obligation to preserve religious unity and to avoid sectarianism, as the verse’s principal intent. But his second and third lessons leave open the possibility of political readings of the command ‘be not divided’ even though political unity of the umma is not generally stressed in Qur’anic commentary of this or related verses. This ambiguity stemmed naturally perhaps from the conviction that religious unity could best be served through political unity, even though for all the commentators both the religious and the political unity of the Prophet’s community was a distant, idealised memory. For the direct link between religious and political unity in the concept of the umma, we must turn to the Islamic literature on the Prophet’s life and teachings. A constant motif in this literature is the Prophet’s stress, consonant with the Qur’anic revelation, that the Muslims are and should remain a united community of believers. Numerous hadiths are devoted to this theme, and none is more frequently invoked than what is perhaps Muhammad’s final admonition on this topic, that given in the famous Farewell Sermon shortly before his death in 632: ‘Know that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood’ (Ibn Ishaq, 1990: 651). But beyond religious fraternity, the Prophet’s actions and teachings suggest that for him, and the earliest Muslim community as a whole, the idea of the umma connoted a very real sense of political unity as well. Shortly after the Hijra, Muhammad




contracted an agreement between the migrants from Mecca (muhajirun) and the natives of Medina (ansar) that laid the foundation for the new Islamic state. The first line of this so-called Constitution of Medina, preserved by Ibn Ishaq in one of the earliest biographies of the Prophet, states: ‘They [the Muslims] are one community [umma] to the exclusion of all men.’ After this, the document enumerates some rudimentary political arrangements for the umma. Tribal loyalties and leadership are not abolished, but they are superseded by the claims of the umma and the authority of Muhammad: ‘Whenever you differ about a matter it must be referred to God and to Muhammad.’ The Muslims are to be one in making war and peace. Jewish tribes who join the covenant are, depending on variant readings of the text, either a part of the Medinan umma or they are a separate umma confederated with the Muslim umma (for the debate on this issue, see Lecker, 2004: 135–9). The Muslims and their Jewish allies are to defend Medina collectively from outside attack, and ‘they must seek mutual advice and consultation’ (Ibn Ishaq, 1990: 231–3). During the ten years of Muhammad’s rule in Medina, according to Muslim sources, the Muslim community remained united both religiously and politically. Signs of divisions within the umma began to appear soon after the Prophet’s death, however. The issue that proved to have the most far-reaching consequences was that of leadership in the community. The majority gave their support to Abu Bakr, a close companion of the Prophet and one of the first Muslim converts. But a small group rallied around ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, who believed that Muhammad had designated him to lead the Muslims shortly before he died. ‘Ali was passed over for the caliphate a second time in 634 in favour of ‘Umar and a third time in 644 when ‘Uthman was selected. Finally, in 656, ‘Ali became caliph, but only under difficult circumstances following the murder of ‘Uthman by Muslims disgruntled with the tyrannical and corrupt administration in Egypt. ‘Ali’s entire five-year tenure as caliph was spent trying to suppress rebellions. His assassination in 661 ended the period of the ‘rightly guided’ caliphate and brought to power the Umayyads, who would claim the institution for their dynasty. Following ‘Ali’s death, the Shi‘is rallied first around ‘Ali’s elder son, Hasan, and after his death in 669, the younger son, Husayn. In 680, Husayn, accompanied by his family and a small party of followers, left Mecca bound for Kufa. Whether Husayn was preparing to challenge the Umayyad caliph Yazid or simply trying to escape the repressive rule of the Umayyads in the Hijaz is still hotly debated. Husayn never reached




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Kufa. He was stopped by an Umayyad force at Karbala, where he and all the males except for one of his sons, who was bedridden by illness, were killed. The martyrdom of Imam Husayn is a searing memory at the centre of Shi‘i piety. It, perhaps more than any other event, has shaped the self-consciousness of the Shi‘is as an embattled minority of true believers (mu’minun) within the body of the Muslim umma. What began as a political dispute over legitimate leadership of the community evolved in the centuries following Karbala into a separate spiritual and legal tradition focusing on the distinct role of the imamate in Shi‘ism. The Sunni–Shi‘i divide is the main religious cleavage that the Muslim umma experienced during the early centuries, but certainly not the only one. Both Sunnism and Shi‘ism underwent further divisions on points of theology and law. The clashes within Sunnism alone were frequently more bitter and divisive than disputes between Sunnis and Shi‘is. The ‘Abbasid era, for example, witnessed protracted theological disputes between Mu‘tazili and Ash‘ari theologians. A number of legal schools (madhahib, sing. madhhab) developed within early Sunnism; by the thirteenth century, four schools dominated and these survive to the present. Different Sufi orders (tariqat, sing. tariqa) sprang up within Sunnism and Shi‘ism, or frequently quite apart from either rite. In short, from an early date, the Muslim umma was far more a religious mosaic than a solid whole. Politically, the Muslim umma experienced its first lasting cleavage shortly after the overthrow of the Umayyads by the ‘Abbasids. After eluding capture by ‘Abbasid forces, ‘Abd al-Rahman, a grandson of the tenth Umayyad caliph, Hisham b. ‘Abd al-Malik, established in 756 an independent Umayyad state in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). Political fragmentation accelerated in the West with the rise of two Shi‘i dynasties, the Idrisids during the late eighth century and the Fatimids in the early tenth century. Similarly, in the eastern reaches of the Empire, ‘Abbasid control would be replaced by Persian and Turkic dynasties beginning in the early ninth century. By the early tenth century, the ‘Abbasid caliphs had been reduced to nominal rulers in Baghdad itself as effective political control passed to a series of Persian, Turkic, Kurdish and Mongol dynasties. The late eighth century also witnessed the early stages in the development of classical Islamic political theory. Internally, the Islamic Empire was fragmenting; externally, it was facing a period of prolonged border wars and gradual retreat all along the northern Mediterranean. In spite of (or perhaps because of) these realities, the classical theory projected a triumphalist, imperialist and unitary vision of Islamic political community,




an ideal vision aimed perhaps at reviving a spirit of internal solidarity that had long since passed. In their vision of world order, the classical theorists propounded the division of the world into different abodes, territories or realms, the precise number and terminology varying widely from writer to writer. Among Sunni writers (but also including many Shi‘i theorists as well), the abode of the Muslim umma was the politically undivided dar alislam. This was the area where Islamic law (shari‘a) held sway, enforced by the just Muslim ruler (the caliph or imam, as the two titles were used interchangeably among Sunnis), where Islamic faith and Muslim lives, property and honour were safeguarded by the state. Dar al-islam was never conceived, however, as exclusively the domain of the Muslim umma. Within its boundaries lived as well the recognised dhimmi (protected) communities, whose lives, property and communal autonomy were safeguarded by the state so long as they did not challenge Muslim sovereignty. Beyond these vague contours, the notion of dar al-islam was not defined with much greater specificity. In time, the idea that dar al-islam constituted a unitary state gave way to its designation to any territory where a Muslim ruler was sovereign (sometimes claiming the title of caliph for himself) and where the Shari‘a was enforced. If anything was left of the original universality invested in the concept by classical theory, it was in notions (largely idealised) of the religious and cultural unity of the Muslim world vis-à-vis non-Muslims. The institution that received the greatest attention from classical theorists was the khilafa, or caliphate. The Qur’an uses the term khalifa (caliph) or its plural forms khala’if and khulafa’ some nine times to describe human beings as God’s vicegerents or stewards on earth (for example 2:30, 38:26), or one group of people as successors or heirs to another (for example 7:69, 10:14). Nowhere – under the rubric khalifa or any other – does the Qur’an prescribe any political institutions to lead the umma after Muhammad. There is only the general command: ‘Obey God, and obey the Messenger, and those in authority [uli al-amr] among you’ (4:59). Given the Qur’an’s silence on the question of leadership after Muhammad and the Prophet’s declining to name his own successor (in the Sunni view), the early Muslim community was left to fend for itself. The legacy of the institution’s birth in the hastily improvised ‘election’ of Abu Bakr, the controversies with the Shi‘i on the legitimacy of its first three incumbents, and the palpable corruption of the ideal institution under the Umayyads and ‘Abbasids all clearly mark the classical literature on




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the caliphate. What is remarkable for the present discussion, however, is the degree to which Sunni theorists clung to the caliphate – corrupted though it was – as the principal manifestation of Muslim political unity. Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), the founder of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, is reported to have said: ‘Whoever secedes from the imam of the Muslims – when the people have agreed on him and acknowledged his caliphate for any reason, either satisfaction with him or compulsion – that rebel has broken the unity of the Muslims and opposed the tradition coming from God’s Messenger’ (Ibn Abi Ya‘la, 1998: 228–9). Two later writers, al-Mawardi (d. 1058) and al-Ghazali (d. 1111), accept the legitimacy of different amirs or sultans, but only so long as they accept the sovereignty of the single caliph. The work of two fourteenth-century theorists, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Ibn Jama‘a (d. 1333), evinces emerging controversies over the institution of the caliphate. Writing in the wake of the destruction of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, Ibn Taymiyya denies the religious necessity of a single caliph and argues for acceptance of separate, autonomous states under the leadership of the wali al-amr (holder of authority). Instead of the caliphate, Ibn Taymiyya upholds Islamic law (Shari‘a) as the marker of the Muslim umma’s integrity and unity. So long as the ruler enforces Shari‘a, he is legitimate and is due the obedience of his people. But Ibn Taymiyya’s contemporary, Ibn Jama‘a, maintains the need for a single caliph, which he strips of any ideal pretensions by declaring that whoever seizes the office and subdues his rivals is the legitimate ruler, ‘so that the unity of the Muslims be assured and they speak with one voice’ (Ibn Jama‘a, 1988: 56–7). By the time that Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) takes up the subject, he is content merely to acknowledge that most scholars forbid the presence of two or more caliphs simultaneously, but that a few, mostly in Spain and North Africa, sanction the presence of multiple caliphs (Lambton, 1981). In the early sixteenth century, the thoroughly fragmented Muslim umma underwent a new and relatively long-lasting political reorganisation with the nearly simultaneous advent of three great empires, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. Each of these empires was in theory and in practice independent of the others. In their heyday, they each constituted politically a separate dar al-islam, two Sunni, one Shi‘i. The Ottomans and Mughals claimed – though without much fervour – to be successors to the classical caliphate, and the Safavids gained legitimacy in part from their claim to be descendants and heirs of the Shi‘i imams. Of course, large Muslim populations around the edges of these three empires continued to live under independent Muslim rulers for




centuries after their advent, until the steady advance of European imperialism brought them, as well as many in the empires themselves, under non-Muslim control. The preceding, necessarily brief treatment of three complex terms leads to the question most germane to this book: what role does the region known today as the Middle East and the peoples who inhabit it play in pre-modern Islamic assertions of unity? More to the point, does the Middle East figure at all in pre-modern discussions of umma, dar al-islam and khilafa? For each of the concepts, we find in early Islamic history attempts to assert the centrality and primacy of Arabs and Arabia and resistance to such attempts grounded in Islam’s egalitarian and universalist ethics. The conquest of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran during the caliphate of ‘Umar brought large numbers of non-Arab peoples into dar al-islam and gradually, through conversion, into the Muslim umma as well. This encounter with much older and ‘refined’ civilisations led to protracted polemics on the nobility and pre-eminence of the Arabs within the umma and their claims to the caliphate. The Khawarij revolt, which broke out amid the civil war between ‘Ali and Mu‘awiya, was, among many other things, the first serious backlash against such claims on behalf of Arabs. The Khawarij challenged not only the notion of the Arabs’ special place among Muslims, but also the specific idea that only an Arab of the Quraysh tribe to which Muhammad belonged could be caliph. One of the reasons, allegedly, for Abu Bakr’s election as the first caliph was the argument advanced by the Meccan immigrants to Medina that only a Qurayshi could claim the loyalty of all Arab tribes and thus maintain the unity of the umma. All four of the rightly guided caliphs were Qurayshi, and perhaps already by the time of the Khawarij revolt, hadiths were circulating purporting to give prophetic sanction to the claims of Arab superiority in Islam and Qurayshi monopoly over the caliphate. The Khawarij repudiated these as contrary to the Qur’an’s strictly egalitarian message. The sole qualification for the caliphate, they asserted, was merit. The Umayyads managed in time to quash the Khawarij revolt and with it their radical views on the caliphate. The idea that the caliphate belonged to the Quraysh remained dogma for centuries to come, through the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid dynasties, and explains perhaps why Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian, Afghan and Mongol overlords were content with the titles of amir or sultan, long after they had stripped the ‘Abbasid caliph of any real power. Arab and Qurayshi claims to the caliphate would resurface in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when modern




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pan-Islam emerged – and so would familiar challenges to such claims grounded in Islamic ethics. The Khawarij defeat ended for the time being the idea that any Muslim could aspire to the caliphate, but not the broader challenge to the claim of Arab superiority within the umma. Under the ‘Abbasids, the influence and prestige of Iranians increased dramatically as a class of Iranian literati occupied senior positions in the Empire. These men proved to be a conduit for the dissemination of Sassanid ideas on literature, morals and statecraft into the Islamic Empire. This ‘Persianising’ of the Empire produced a backlash among defenders of Arab primacy, which in turn produced the Shu‘ubiyya movement over the following three centuries. The controversy seems to have centred on literary issues, with the Shu‘ubiyya asserting the equal and often the greater excellence of the Persian language over Arabic (Gibb, 1962). But the broader moral and political implications lay not too far below the surface. The Shu‘ubiyya derived their name from a key Qur’anic verse on the subject of egalitarianism, 49:13: ‘O people! We created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations [shu‘ub] and tribes [qaba’il], so you may know each other. Truly the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most righteous among you.’ In one of the most detailed accounts of Shu‘ubiyya arguments, Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih (d. 940) notes the Shu‘ubiyya are often labelled ahl al-taswiyya, the ‘people of equality’, because they say: The believers are brothers, whose lives are equal in value before the law . . . As [Muhammad] said in the farewell pilgrimage in the speech in which he bade farewell to his community and with which he set a seal on his prophecy: ‘O man, God has removed from you the baseless pride of the period of ignorance and its glorying in ancestors. You are all from Adam, and Adam was from the dust. The Arab has no superiority to the non-Arab except by virtue of righteousness. (Mottahedeh, 1976: 164) Yet, as Roy Mottahedeh notes, the equality that most Shu‘ubi exponents embraced was confined mainly to the afterlife and not the present. The main lesson they drew from Q. 49:13 was that the Qur’an recognised both non-Arabs (especially Iranians) when it speaks of the shu‘ub and Arabs when mentioning the qaba’il, while chastising the Arabs for their pride in tribal genealogies, which were of little moral worth in Islam (Mottahedeh, 1976). Because the Shu‘ubiyya never constituted an identifiable group or put forth a coherent ideology or body of arguments, their legacy is hard to




appraise. The faultline between Arab and Persian that the Shu‘ubiyya controversy illuminated so graphically is visible in later Islamic history, particularly after the Safavid conversion of Iran to Shi‘ism added the element of sectarianism to the divide. For the purposes of the present discussion, what may be said with some confidence is that in its drive to elevate the place of Iranians within the umma by deprecating Arab arrogance, the Shu‘ubiyya indirectly reinforced the egalitarian and universalist claims first advanced by the Khawarij. In the case of dar al-islam, precise territorial delimitation of its boundaries was never an important concern of its theorists. Indeed, in theory, the boundaries of dar al-islam could not be fixed because they were to expand progressively until the entire world had been incorporated into the abode of Islam. Nevertheless, in Islamic spirituality, Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem were sacred cities from the earliest period. As the qibla, or direction for prayer for all mosques and all Muslims anywhere in the world, and the site of the annual hajj rituals, Mecca in particular held a central place in Muslim religious and popular culture. In legends and in cartography, Mecca was not only the spiritual centre of dar al-islam, but also the physical centre or ‘navel’ of the earth (Hashmi, 2003: 186–94). Politically, however, the centrality of Arabia within dar al-islam ended in 661, when the first Umayyad caliph Mu‘awiya transferred the seat of Empire from Medina to Damascus. Less than a century later, the ‘Abbasids would shift it again to Baghdad, but Baghdad would be rivalled in the centuries to come by other great political, intellectual and cultural centres, including Cordoba, Marrakesh, Cairo, Bukhara and Delhi. As the political unity of dar al-islam ended, so did the centrality of the Middle East in the politics of dar al-islam, not to be revived until the end of the nineteenth century when modern pan-Islam appealed to memories of the early caliphate.

The development of modern pan-Islam Pan-Islam developed as a modern political force in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century. There are no clear historical markers in terms of events, theorists or documents that signal its emergence and evolution. In fact, it began as it remains today, a general set of ideas that can only loosely be termed an ideology and a number of historical efforts that only loosely constitute a movement. What defined this movement towards Muslim unity – unlike two other nineteenth-century movements, the Wahhabiyya (Wahhabism) and the Mahdiyya, not to mention many others in Islamic history – was that




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it was to be achieved not through conquest, but by co-optation and cooperation. The term ittihad-i islam (union of Islam) began to appear in the writings of the Young Ottomans during the late 1860s. In these initial references, the implication was that the Ottoman sultan had obligations to assist Muslims threatened by European encroachment even if they lived beyond the Empire (Mardin, 1962: 60–1). By the 1870s, the Young Ottomans had explicitly taken up the possibility of an Islamic union led by the sultan. As Namik Kemal (d. 1888) argued, not only was such a union necessary to stave off the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, it was also now feasible because of the advance of mass communication media (Landau, 1994: 2–3). Some of the earliest occurrences of the term ‘pan-Islam’ in Europe occur in reviews of Young Ottoman ideas, but it would not enter general use until the 1880s when the French writer Gabriel Charmes popularised it in his analyses of Muslim, and particularly Ottoman, efforts to unite in the wake of the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 (Lee, 1942: 280; Landau, 1994: 1–2). Thus, in both its Ottoman and European usage, pan-Islam from an early date meant Ottoman efforts to forge some sort of broader Muslim unity with the European threat to the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim states as the primary motivation. By the end of the nineteenth century, pan-Islam had come to be associated with two men above all others: the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) and Jamal al-Din Asadabadi, better known as al-Afghani (d. 1897). Abdülhamid cultivated the pan-Islamic sentiments that had emerged during the 1860s and 1870s under the reign of his predecessor Abdülaziz, gave them specific content and then disseminated them through the Ottoman bureaucracy and agents such as al-Afghani. As it had for Abdülaziz, pan-Islam provided Abdülhamid with a rallying cry against both European powers and internal modernisers and critics of the sultanate. Central to Abdülhamid’s strategy was gaining widespread recognition that he was the caliph of Islam. The Ottoman sultans’ claim to be heirs of the classical caliphate was rooted in the legend that the last ‘Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, had formally invested the conquering sultan Selim I with the caliphal office in early sixteenth-century Cairo. The legend had little historical credibility, and neither Sultan Selim nor his successors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adopted the title khalifa in any official capacity. It was not until the late eighteenth century that the Ottomans began to assert formal claims to the title of caliph, as famously in the 1774 Ottoman–Russian Treaty of Kuçuk Kaynarja, which




described the sultan as ‘the imam of the believers and the sovereign caliph of the Muhammadan religion’. The intention was to establish the sultan’s religious authority over Muslim populations now under Russian control, but the Russians nullified such claims when the treaty was revised in 1783 (Sourdel, 1978: 945–6). Abdülhamid laid claim to the caliphate with far greater purpose and vigour than any of his predecessors, and for the first time serious attempts were made to win the loyalty of Muslims beyond the Ottoman realm. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 contained language linking ‘the august Ottoman sultanate’ with ‘the office of the supreme Islamic caliphate’ (Article 3). It also declared that ‘the sultan, in his capacity as caliph, is the protector of the Muslim religion’ (Article 4). Inside the Empire, Abdülhamid’s pan-Islamic policies meant the cultivation of Muslim interests over those of Christian and other non-Muslim minorities as well as increased state support for Islamic courts, schools and religious orders. Outside the Empire, a propaganda campaign was launched, using print media and emissaries or spies, to spread an image of the sultan as a pious Muslim ruler, the only one capable of effectively uniting Muslims against Christian colonisers. No propagandist for pan-Islam travelled more widely, agitated more fervently and ultimately influenced more people (albeit without leaving any clear legacy) than al-Afghani. In his early career, al-Afghani emphasised the need for reform within particular Muslim states, under the leadership of their own rulers, to stave off further European inroads. By the 1870s, however, his activism had assumed a decidedly pan-Islamic emphasis. He argued that the only way to ameliorate the weakness of individual Muslim states was to form a bloc of semi-autonomous states, all recognising the suzerainty of the Ottoman caliph. Al-Afghani thus sought to combine nationalism and pan-Islam, apparently seeing no contradiction between the two (Keddie, 1969). When Abdülhamid ascended the throne in 1876 and declared his caliphal ambitions in the guise of pan-Islam, al-Afghani professed his support. He repeatedly offered to serve as the sultan’s roving ambassador, but the naturally suspicious Abdülhamid never acquiesced. The sultan had other plans for al-Afghani. Abdülhamid was aware that any prospects for pan-Islamic unity hinged on gaining the support of Shi‘i Iran. Physically, Iran was a barrier between the Ottomans and the Sunni Muslims of Central and South Asia; religiously, Iran could stir up animosity against the sultan among the large Shi‘i populations of Iraq and India. In al-Afghani, Abdülhamid found the man who not only thought that Sunnis and Shi‘is could unite under Abdülhamid’s




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leadership, but also one who had the contacts and the influence to realise this goal. Al-Afghani was himself of Iranian and Shi‘i origin, though as his adopted name indicates, he masked his background. What Abdülhamid did know was that al-Afghani had spent years living and travelling in Iran, most recently from 1889 to 1892. When al-Afghani arrived in Istanbul in 1892 on the invitation of the sultan, he formed a society of Iranian and other Shi‘i intellectuals in the capital with the aim of developing a pan-Islamic ideology that transcended sectarianism (Cole, 2002). This project remained confined to a small circle of elites, many of whom were political radicals or schismatic Babis who had little influence among Shi‘i Iranians. Moreover, Abdülhamid had no intention of letting his (or al-Afghani’s) pan-Islamic ambitions lead to a clash with Iran, so he prevented al-Afghani from conducting any serious agitation inside Iran (Keddie, 1983: 30–1). Relations between al-Afghani and Abdülhamid soon soured and al-Afghani died in Istanbul five years later, complaining that he was a prisoner of the sultan. Abdülhamid’s claims to the universal caliphate were challenged immediately, both inside and outside the Empire. Among Arab intellectuals, the sultan’s efforts ran afoul of growing disenchantment with the severity and corruption of Ottoman rule and the first stirrings of Arab nationalism. Al-Afghani’s principal disciple, the Egyptian jurist and reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905), confided in 1897 to his own disciple Rashid Rida (d. 1935) that he viewed Abdülhamid’s claims as motivated by nothing more than personal ambition and a desire to strengthen his position with the Europeans (Kerr, 1966: 147). Another member of ‘Abduh’s circle, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (d. 1902), emerged as one of the most strident opponents of Turkish-led pan-Islam. Al-Kawakibi, like Rida, was Syrian-born and therefore raised as an Ottoman subject before relocating to Cairo. His first book, Taba’i‘ al-istibdad (Characteristics of tyranny), is a direct attack on the despotism of Abdülhamid II. Al-Kawakibi argued that the revival of Islamic civilisation required sweeping political change, beginning with the overthrow of Ottoman tyranny over Arabs and the institution of an Arab caliphate. Talk of restoring the caliphate to its ‘rightful’ incumbents was very much in the air, propagated in part by a group of British Arabophiles led by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (d. 1922). Among all the Arab reformers of the period, al-Kawakibi emerged as the leading advocate for Arab primacy in the reform and revival of the umma. Al-Kawakibi focuses on this theme in his second book, Umm al-qura (Mother of the cities), a title he takes from a Qur’anic reference (6:92) to Mecca, where he places a fictional conference of representatives from various Muslim countries aimed at




charting the reform of Muslim peoples. In the book he outlines ‘the excellences of the Arabs’ with as much gusto as any Arab panegyrist during the Shu‘ubiyya controversy, concluding with the claim: ‘The Arabs are of all nations the most suitable to be an authority in religion and an example to the Muslims; the other nations have followed their guidance at the start and will not refuse to follow them now’ (Haim, 1962: 78–9). By the turn of the twentieth century, Abdülhamid’s pan-Islamic enterprise was widely perceived as stillborn. In one of the earliest scholarly analyses of pan-Islam, the British orientalist E. G. Browne laments, ‘Unfortunately, I was not permitted to choose the subject of this lecture, which, as you see from your programmes, is described as “pan-Islamism.” I certainly should not have chosen this subject for myself, because in the first place . . . I am not quite sure what it means; and, in the second place, I am still less certain whether any such thing really exists’ (Browne, 1902: 306). The Young Turk revolt of 1908 that removed Abdülhamid from power pursued a policy of Turkish chauvinism that was in part a reaction to the meagre results of the Young Ottomans’ and Abdülhamid’s pan-Islamic appeals. Yet, pan-Islamic appeals continued to be heard in the period before and after the First World War. The Young Turks themselves resorted to them, culminating in the Ottoman jihad proclamation of November 1914, which aimed, along the same lines as Abdülhamid’s pan-Islamic overtures, to mobilise Muslim opinion against Britain, France and Russia. None of the pan-Islamic appeals of the time produced any significant results because they were perceived as serving only narrow Turkish, Arab or Indian Muslim nationalism. In the case of the Ottoman jihad proclamation, for example, a number of leading Indian ‘ulama signed a fatwa declaring that the Turks’ war was politically, not religiously, motivated and thus should not be considered jihad by any Muslim. Nevertheless, Indian Muslim sympathy for their Turkish coreligionists surfaced frequently during the war, as in Shawkat ‘Ali’s statement: ‘There is not a Musalman who in heart does not pray for the victory of the Caliph and the defeat and destruction of his enemies, including Britain’ (Özcan, 1997: 180–1). The issue that most stirred pan-Islamic loyalties in a way not seen before was the perceived threat to the caliphate at the end of the First World War. No Muslim population was more transfixed and agitated by the fate of the caliphate than the large one of India – evidence, if any, that Abdülhamid’s pan-Islamic venture had not entirely failed. The Khilafat movement that began in 1919 was a confluence of many personalities and issues within Indian Islam, but in its pan-Islamic concerns for the




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Turkish caliph and more generally for the Turkish nation, it found its most galvanising cause. The shock to Indian Muslims was, therefore, profound when in 1924 the caliphate was abolished not by infidel powers occupying Turkey, but by the Turkish Grand National Assembly freely exercising its national sovereignty. The end of the Ottoman caliphate raised questions about Islamic religious community and politics that would have been familiar to thirteenth-century Muslims after the virtual elimination of the ‘Abbasid caliphate. What is the role of the caliph? Who is qualified to be caliph? Is a caliph even necessary according to Islamic law? Controversy over these issues might have been avoided or at least curtailed had one immediate claimant to the caliphate gained wider recognition. Sharif Husayn of Mecca was to many Arabs a likely choice: as the head of the sharifian house of Mecca, he could claim direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Moreover, as the leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks, he and his sons were now in a position to claim political leadership over the Arab nations newly liberated from the Turks. Thus, Sharif Husayn could claim pre-eminence among Muslims worldwide and among Arabs, combining in his person the institutions of caliph and king. Following the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, pro-Hashemite groups in Arabia and Syria had already declared their loyalty to Sharif Husayn as caliph, and their efforts increased in early March 1924 when news spread of the Turkish Parliament’s decision to end the Ottoman caliphate. The campaign failed. The sharif was disliked among large numbers of Indian Muslims for his leadership of the Arab revolt against the Turkish caliph, which aided Europeans in dismembering the Ottoman Empire. And in the Arab world, the sharif had to contend with the ambitions of other Arab princes, those of Egypt and the Najd in particular. The latter, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud, decisively ended Sharif Husayn’s ambitions when his forces overran the Hijaz in late 1924. Following the abortive Hashemite bid for the caliphate, debate on what to do with this institution entered a phase of scholarly disputation in print and in conferences. ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (d. 1966), a jurist and teacher at al-Azhar, stirred intense controversy when he published Al-Islam wa usul al-hukm (Islam and the bases of power) in 1925. His immediate purpose was to deny the religious necessity for the institution of the caliphate. But in order to make this point, he asserted something much broader: neither the Qur’an nor the hadith contain a blueprint for political institutions, and therefore there was no reason to conclude that religion should define Muslim political life. His critics, among them Rashid Rida, saw in ‘Abd al-Raziq’s thesis a dangerous opening for a




secular politics divorced from any religious and moral grounding. Rida had himself completed a lengthy study on the caliphate in 1923, in which he embraced many aspects of the traditional political theory, including the religious requirement of the institution, while proposing novel ways to fill the office. Rida’s pan-Islamic aspirations run throughout the work. ‘The umma as a whole is responsible for [restoring the imamate]’, he writes, ‘for it is sovereign in this matter . . . The representatives of the umma, “those who bind and loose”, must work actively to this end, as it is they who are responsible for all the interests of the umma, and for the question of the supreme authority in particular’ (Hourani, 1983: 242). He hoped that the process of electing the caliph would periodically bring the umma together. But his vision extended to continually operating international institutions, including a seminary where the electors and future caliphs would be trained and a bureaucracy to support the caliph’s work. Rida was actively involved in the three international conferences that convened to take up the issue of the caliphate. Two conferences held in 1926 – one in Cairo, the other in Mecca – ended in bitter disagreements over who should assume the title. The third conference, held in Jerusalem in 1931, was attended by approximately 133 delegates from over 20 countries, including for the first time prominent Shi‘is. All in all, the very convening of the conference was the most notable achievement for pan-Islamic organisation up to that time. By the time of this gathering, however, the issue of the caliphate had been supplanted by growing Muslim concerns with the future of Palestine. The majority quickly shut down debate on the caliphate when Shawkat ‘Ali of India vociferously argued the case for restoring the title to Abdülmajid, the last Ottoman to hold the title, now in exile in France. The conference ended by adopting resolutions calling for the creation of a permanent secretariat for a proposed Mu’tamar al-‘Alam al-Islami (rendered in English as World Muslim Congress), which would convene every two years in Jerusalem. The secretariat did function for a short time, but the congress never reconvened in Jerusalem (Kramer, 1986). By the end of the Second World War, the centre of pan-Islamic activity had shifted decisively to South Asia. For both pragmatic and ideological reasons, the new state of Pakistan emerged as the chief proponent of Islamic solidarity among the growing community of independent Muslim states. Pragmatically, the leaders of Pakistan needed foreign support in their conflict with India over Kashmir. Rallying Muslim support appeared to them a logical first step. Pakistani leadership in efforts to forge Islamic unity seemed to make sense ideologically as well.




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Pakistan was created on the basis of the ‘two-nation theory’, the idea that Muslims by virtue of their religion constituted a distinct nation within British India, deserving of the right to self-determination. The Pakistan that emerged on the basis of the two-nation theory was territorially divided into two halves, East and West Pakistan, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. A sizable Muslim minority remained in India. Nevertheless, Pakistan was at the time the most populous Muslim country. In the first national constitution adopted in March 1956, the first of the ‘directive principles of state policy’ was that ‘the State shall endeavour to strengthen the bonds of unity among Muslim countries’. This directive had already been pursued during the past nine years of the country’s existence, in part through Pakistani initiative in convening international Muslim conferences. The overtly pan-Islamic phase of Pakistani foreign policy was manifested in a number of official and semi-official attempts to forge a united Islamic front. The first major effort came in the Middle East tour of Chaudhry Khaliq al-Zaman, the president of the All-Pakistan Muslim League. Khaliq al-Zaman embarked upon his tour in September 1949 with the avowed aim of sounding ‘public opinion for the formation of a people’s organisation, “a World Muslim League”, representing all Muslim countries in the world with a view to discussing common factors among themselves and also evolving if necessary a common policy which may benefit Islam and the Muslim world as a whole’ (Burke, 1973: 135). Khaliq al-Zaman’s tour took him to Iran, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, giving him an opportunity to appraise Iranian and Arab views on the future of Muslim cooperation. In Cairo, he came out openly for the creation of ‘Islamistan’, which he elaborated would be a sort of ‘Atlantic Pact of the Muslim world . . . an iron curtain against foreign ideologies’ (Burke, 1973: 135). The proposal was quickly and firmly rejected by Arab leaders. Pakistan was openly mocked in the Arab press as an upstart nation attempting to assume leadership of the Muslim world through this scheme for unity. The Arab response demonstrated quite clearly that Arab and Pakistani leaders were fundamentally at odds not only on what form Islamic cooperation should take in international affairs, but also on the question of the role of Islam in politics generally. Among the emerging Arab leaders of the time, Islamic ideology was not the basis for the nationalist movements they led. Islamic ideology, in their perception, was not sufficient to provide a source of identity and a national consciousness in the anticolonial struggles underway. The ascendant form of Arab nationalism at




the time, revolutionary pan-Arabism, as described by Morten Valbjørn in Chapter 7, was firmly secular in the formulation of both its Muslim and Christian ideologues. It appealed to a common historical and cultural heritage and an affinity for the homeland, translated into Arabic as watan. Even the word umma, which, as we have seen in its Islamic context, clearly defines a community according to faith and not ethnicity or race, had by now long since been appropriated in the nationalist cause with references to the ‘Arab umma’. Opposition groups within the Arab world, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, who rejected this secular nationalism on Islamic grounds were deeply suspect and suppressed. Since the 1930s, the Brotherhood had espoused pan-Arab unity as the first step towards a pan-Islamic confederation of states, with a largely symbolic and spiritual caliph at its head (Landau, 1994: 225). Similarly, Pakistan, whose creation was justified on Islamic grounds and whose leaders continued to declare its pan-Islamic mission, was deeply suspect among Arab leaders. The view of Pakistan as a ‘Trojan horse’ of British imperialism left behind in partitioned South Asia – just as Israel had been left in a partitioned Palestine – lingered in the Arab world (Singh, 1970: 38). The fervour with which Pakistanis pursued the cause of Islamic solidarity and their frequent declarations of Pakistan’s destiny to lead the Muslim world because of its large population and central location compounded the suspicion with annoyance. This was particularly the case in Egypt, where Pakistani ambitions collided with Egyptian designs for leadership among Arab states and later in the Nonaligned Movement. The controversy engendered by Khaliq al-Zaman’s Islamistan proposal led the Pakistani government to disavow quickly any official sanction for the idea. For the moment, any overtly interstate aspect to panIslamic cooperation or organisation was put in abeyance, in Pakistan and elsewhere. Instead, Pakistani leaders turned their attention to ‘private’ pan-Islamic ventures. The first Islamic Economic Conference met on 25 November to 5 December 1949 in Karachi and was attended by 21 delegations. The conference concluded with a declaration on the desirability for concerted action towards cultural and economic progress. Despite the general enthusiasm with which the meeting ended and subsequent conferences in Syria in 1951 and again in Karachi in 1954, the participating states never succeeded in establishing an institutional framework for the joint efforts envisaged by the final declaration. Prior to his departure for the Middle East in September 1949, Khaliq al-Zaman had initiated the reconvening of the World Muslim Congress (defunct since the mid-1930s) in Karachi on 18–20 February 1949.




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The purpose for the rejuvenated congress was billed as entirely apolitical, a forum for linking Muslims socially and culturally in an attempt to realise the Islamic ideal of Muslim brotherhood. The first meeting concluded with the declaration that to achieve its goal, the conference had first to strive for the liberation of all Muslim peoples still under colonial rule. A much grander gathering followed two years later. Again held in Karachi, the second conference was attended by over 120 delegates from 36 Muslim countries and chaired by Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, who had been a driving force behind the 1931 gathering. In the course of the four-day convocation, the conference adopted over 13 resolutions ranging from a declaration that aggression against any Muslim state would be viewed as an aggression against all, to expressions of support for Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Africa and Yugoslavia. The Pakistani government was careful to emphasise the ‘unofficial’ nature of all these conferences. Nevertheless, the government’s active role in convening the conferences was barely disguised. Prime Minister Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan delivered the inaugural address at the second World Muslim Congress, in which he took the opportunity to propound the notion of a ‘commonwealth of Muslim nations’, an idea his government was pushing quietly through diplomatic channels in the Arab world at the time. Such an association, Liyaqat argued, would be the Islamic world’s response to both the Western and the communist blocs. Islam would be shown to have an ideology unique among the contending ideologies of the world, one ‘capable of addressing the challenges of the modern world’ (Hussain, 1966: 136–8). Pakistan’s efforts in the 1950s to move pan-Islamic organisation from the transnational to the interstate level proved fruitless. Its military alliances with the United States in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and with Great Britain in the Baghdad Pact alienated it further from Arab states. But the non-governmental, transnational dimension to pan-Islam continued to develop. The World Muslim Congress was formally established with a secretariat in Karachi, and further conferences on topics ranging from economic development and educational reform to nuclear non-proliferation took place over the following decades. A second organisation was founded in 1962 in Saudi Arabia through the initiative of Faisal, at the time the prime minister and crown prince. The Rabitat al-‘Alam al-Islami (Muslim World League) was created as a non-governmental forum for the discussion and dissemination of Islamic viewpoints on issues facing Muslims around the world. In hindsight, the establishment of the Muslim World League under Saudi patronage




signalled a shift back to the Middle East as the regional locus for pan-Islamic organisation. Faisal’s personal commitment to pan-Islam, the Saudis’ prestige as ‘guardians of the two holy shrines’ and Saudi Arabia’s increasing financial leverage among Muslim states all contributed to pushing Saudi Arabia to the forefront in this area. From December 1965 to September 1966, Faisal toured nine Muslim states, urging in each the need to create an Islamic intergovernmental organisation. His efforts may have met the same fate as the Pakistanis’ abortive ventures a decade earlier had the Six Day War and the loss of Jerusalem to Israel not jolted Muslim peoples and their leaders (Baba, 1994: 50). In 1969, as Simon Murden discusses in Chapter 6, 24 Muslim states voted to form the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. As an intergovernmental organisation based, at least ostensibly, on religious solidarity, it was unique at its founding and remains so still.

2 The Middle East in contemporary pan-Islam Pan-Islam in the form of ideologies and organisations finds manifold expressions today around the world and in all three domains of international society. The following discussion focuses on those aspects that specifically pertain to the place of the Middle East in pan-Islamic organisations and ideologies. The interstate domain The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is the formal embodiment of pan-Islam at the interstate level today. Its present membership stands at 57 (56 states and the Palestinian territories). All Muslimmajority states, with the possible exception of Eritrea, are members (a total of 44), including the 14 states located in what is generally considered to be the Middle East. Two other states, Kazakhstan and Nigeria, with Muslim populations in excess of 40 per cent of their total population are members. Thus, in terms of states, the OIC can lay claim to be a nearly universal organisation of those with a predominantly Muslim population. In terms of Muslim peoples, however, the OIC as presently constituted excludes from formal representation large and growing Muslim populations around the world. India, with more than 136 million Muslims, ranks third behind Indonesia and Pakistan for total Muslim population. Its application to join the OIC has been blocked since the 1970s by Pakistan, which contends that despite the large numbers of Muslims, they constitute only 12 to 13 per cent of the total population, and




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thus India is an overwhelmingly non-Muslim country. Yet, Pakistan did not object to membership by Uganda, Suriname and Togo, which have percentages of Muslims comparable to India. The real reason for Pakistan’s objection to India’s membership is, of course, the Kashmir conflict. India’s interest in joining the OIC has also cooled following repeated OIC resolutions backing the Pakistani position in this dispute. Still, India’s involvement in the organisation in some capacity remains a perennial concern, with several prominent members such as Egypt, Iran, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia proposing at least an observer status akin to the role the Russian Federation currently plays within the OIC (Ansari, 2006). Apart from India, Muslims in China and North America are also not represented formally in the organs of the OIC. The single European country to participate is Bosnia and Herzegovina, but only as an observer. Geographically, the OIC remains centred in Saudi Arabia, which hosts its secretariat and a number of other subsidiary organs. But in other important ways the organisation has made efforts not to be identified with any particular country or region. Islamic summits have been hosted by a number of Muslim countries, including Senegal, Morocco, Pakistan and Malaysia, as have the annual and extraordinary meetings of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers, the OIC’s principal decisionmaking body. Similarly, the secretaries-general have been elected to ensure wide ethnic representation in the office. The first secretarygeneral was Tunku ‘Abd al-Rahman of Malaysia and his eight successors have come from Egypt, Senegal, Tunisia, Pakistan, Niger, Morocco and Turkey. In terms of its objectives, the original OIC Charter, adopted in 1972, reflected the central role played by the Palestinian issue in the organisation’s founding. Article 5 stated that the OIC would ‘coordinate efforts for the safeguarding of the Holy Places and support of the struggle of the people of Palestine, to help them regain their rights and liberate their land’ (Charter of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, 1972: Article 5). In deference to some members’ demands that other Muslim causes be recognised as well, the charter added in Article 6 that the OIC would ‘back the struggle of all Muslim people with a view to preserving their dignity, independence and national rights’ (Charter of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, 1972: Article 6). Nevertheless, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has dominated the OIC agenda with greater consistency, frequency and relative unity of purpose than other conflicts that have diverted its attention from time to time. The unity is relative to the deep-rooted divisions that have stymied the organisation from




playing any effective role in other Middle Eastern crises, including the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War (Hashmi, 1997: 74–9). The Iran–Iraq War and the Iraq War exposed a level of ethno-sectarian hostilities in Middle East interstate politics that had not been seen since the Ottoman–Safavid wars. At their root was the conservative Arab states’ fear of Khomeinism, an anti-monarchical, anti-Western revolutionary ideology, with appeal to Sunni and Shi‘i radicals. The Islamic Republic of Iran adopted in 1979 a constitution that included the following directive: ‘All Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic and cultural unity of the Islamic world’ (Article 11). It is unclear how and if Khomeini and the Islamic Republic intended to pursue these pan-Islamic ambitions. The Iran–Iraq War diverted Iran from pursuing such efforts in a concerted way, and Iran has generally pursued pragmatic, state-centric policies in the years since. The Iraq War, however, revived fears of Iranian irredentism in the Middle East. Iran is undoubtedly exploiting regional instability to strengthen its dominant position in the Persian Gulf. But it is Arab leaders such as King ‘Abdallah of Jordan, Husni Mubarak of Egypt and King ‘Abdallah of Saudi Arabia who have injected sectarianism into regional politics by warning against the ‘Shi‘i crescent’ that Iran is fostering now that the Sunni Iraqi bulwark has collapsed. In its essence, the thesis is nothing more than a rehashing of old anti-Shi‘i polemics in combination with the Arab–Persian rivalry of the Shu‘ubiyya controversy. It disregards the deep-rooted divisions, in terms of religious authority and political loyalties, that often divide Arab Shi‘is from Iranian Shi‘is. In fact, the ‘Alawis of Syria have historically not been considered Shi‘is at all, but as heretics by the majority Twelver Imamis (Moosa, 1988: 409–18). Moreover, the idea that Iran is fostering a pan-Shi‘i alliance in the Middle East neglects its close support of the staunchly Sunni Palestinian Hamas. In short, there is little substance to the Shi‘i crescent thesis, and it seems to have found little credence among ordinary Middle Easterners. After years of debating the organisation’s priorities and how to make it more effective, the OIC adopted a new charter on 14 March 2008, as the central component of a ‘New Vision’. The document still contains a reference to ‘the struggle of the Palestinian people’ in its list of objectives, but higher on the list are the goals of promoting human rights and democracy within member states and of fostering ‘noble Islamic values concerning moderation, tolerance, respect for diversity, preservation




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of Islamic symbols and common heritage and to defend the universality of Islamic religion’. The new charter also promises to eliminate one perennial cause of paralysis within the organisation: instead of unanimous agreement, a simple majority will now suffice to approve new members. Clearly, the OIC’s New Vision reflects increased concerns with the strain that terrorism has caused in relations between Muslim and Western states and the sharp increase in Islamophobia in countries around the world. The rhetoric of the new charter is aimed at reaffirming that Muslims fully subscribe to the governing norms and institutions of international society. The transnational domain The Muslim umma today is not only global in its dispersion, it is also increasingly transnational. The transnational domain is robust and rapidly expanding. Muslims have made full use of technological advances in travel and communication to nurture traditionally transnational institutions, such as scholarly networks and Sufi and other pietist communities, as well as to create new transnational linkages and institutions, including charities and other philanthropic organisations, sporting events, and widely scattered and loosely connected militant groups. These have been amply studied in a number of recent works, most prominently by Peter Mandaville (Mandaville, 2001; 2007) and Olivier Roy (Roy, 2004). Mandaville aptly observes that as much as transnationalism creates the possibilities for greater Muslim interaction, it simultaneously demonstrates ever more clearly the diversity and political divisions of the umma. ‘In this regard, a new “umma consciousness” does not in and of itself lead to greater Muslim unity’ (Mandaville, 2007: 299). Muslims are well aware of the centrifugal aspects of globalisation. I will discuss here only briefly three cases of attempts, each in their own way, to combat these disintegrative trends. The Muslim World League based in Mecca not only survives as a relic from a previous era of pan-Islamic organisation, it has flourished, thanks largely to the generous financial support of the Saudi government. It has developed into an NGO with numerous branches, active in publication and distribution of Islamic literature, supervision of mosques supported by its funds, and charitable relief of Muslims suffering from natural disaster. Through it, critics charge, the Saudi state is able to project its Wahhabi creed into Muslim communities around the world. This has had the effect of promoting a conservative and intolerant strain of pan-Islam, one averse to Muslim political and cultural assimilation in non-Muslim




countries and to the improvement of women’s status (Abou El Fadl, 2007: 73–4). Undoubtedly, the most politically potent transnational Muslim actors today are terrorist groups. The war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989 proved decisive in fostering transnational linkages among Islamic militants, many of whom made their way to Afghanistan as part of a multinational jihad effort. Al Qaeda emerged out of this conflict, and once they had acquired a base for their activities in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, they took their jihad to the global level. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s leaders and principal spokesmen, have on occasion invoked the umma and the caliphate when describing their goals. In an interview bin Laden gave to al Jazeera on 21 October 2001, he stated, for example: ‘Our concern is that our umma unites either under the Words of the Book of God or His Prophet, and that this nation should establish the righteous caliphate’ (Lawrence, 2005: 121). Yet unification of the entire Muslim umma and the resurrection of the caliphate are not issues on which bin Laden or Zawahiri dwell. Al Qaeda’s pressing concerns are relatively more immediate, in both space and time. The issues that recur in its declarations, including the two best-known statements of its mission, the ‘manifesto’ of 1996 and the 1998 fatwa declaring war against all Americans, are the American and Zionist-led ‘crusade’ against Muslims, which includes military invasion and occupation of Muslim lands, as well as political, economic and cultural intervention in Muslim affairs. Pan-Islamic appeals seem in al Qaeda’s strategy to be more a means than an end – at least not a short-term end, which is to repulse the ‘crusaders’ and bring down their Muslim stooges as the first step in creating genuinely Islamic states in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan (Hashmi, 2006). The contemporary Muslim group most closely associated with the goal of re-establishing the caliphate is Hizb al-Tahrir. It was founded in the early 1950s in Jerusalem and now has an organisational presence in some 40 countries, including many in the West. It has a particularly active following in the United Kingdom. Hizb al-Tahrir’s overarching goal is da‘wa or the call to Islamic faith, but unlike the vast majority of such groups today, it links this religious mission with the political ambition of creating a universal Islamic state led by a khalifa. The group’s ‘draft constitution’ establishes that the caliph will be elected by universal franchise of Muslims, and, once in power, only he will have the authority to pass the ‘final constitution’ of the Islamic state. Hizb al-Tahrir’s literature (much of it conveniently available on the group’s website www.khilafah.com) describes the process of realising




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the new dar al-islam as consisting of stages that replicate the Prophet Muhammad’s actions in creating the Medinan state. Leaders of the group have repeatedly declared that they do not advocate violence to realise their ends, but their critics charge this is a pragmatic, not a principled, stand. Clearly, the pan-Islamic aspirations central to Hizb al-Tahrir’s mission pose a threat to the regimes that would have to be overthrown in order to reconstitute dar al-islam, and the group has been declared illegal and suppressed in a number of Muslim and non-Muslim states. The interhuman domain The same technological advances that have helped foster Muslim transnational organisations and movements have undeniably increased the degree to which Muslims know about and interact with other Muslims. At the same time, greater information and contact have not diminished intra-Muslim conflicts, within and across states and within and across the Sunni–Shi‘i divide. In recent years, Iraq has become the arena where intrasectarian as well as intersectarian conflict has played out in full. Is there any basis then for assuming that the umma concept has any relevance among ordinary Muslims today? Two surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2005 and 2006 as part of its Global Attitudes Project provide some of the most specific data available to date (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2005; 2006). In May 2005, Muslim respondents in Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey were asked: ‘Do you think of yourself first as a (name of country’s people, such as Jordanian, Moroccan or Indonesian) or first as a Muslim?’ In April and May 2006, the same question was posed to Muslim respondents in Indonesia, Jordan and Pakistan, as well as in Egypt, France, Germany, Nigeria, Spain and the United Kingdom. Table 8.1 consolidates the results for both years, with the Muslim-majority states listed first. In six of the eight Muslim-majority states surveyed, self-identification with Islam was considerably greater than with the respondents’ own country. The results were almost evenly divided only in Indonesia (in both 2005 and 2006) and in Lebanon (in 2005). The most surprising result comes perhaps from Turkey, where, in spite of some 80 years of education and socialisation in Kemalist secular nationalism, healthy majorities professed greater identification as Muslims than as Turks. The number identifying with Islam in fact increased markedly from 2005 to 2006. The percentages of Muslims who identify with Islam more than their home country were also greater in the four European countries sampled. Only French Muslims expressed comparable levels of primary




196 Sohail H. Hashmi Muslim versus national identity (2005/06, per cent of respondents). Country’s people

Egypt Indonesia Lebanon Jordan Morocco Nigeria Pakistan Turkey France Germany Spain UK

na/23 35/39 30/na 23/21 7/na na/25 7/6 29/19 na/42 na/13 na/3 na/7

Muslim


Both equally

Other

Don’t know/ refused


na/* na/0 na/na na/0 na/na na/* na/* na/* na/* na/8 na/2 na/1

na/0 */0 1/na */0 */na na/2 1/0 1/* na/2 na/3 na/* na/3

* = less than 1 per cent

identification with their country, whereas in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, the numbers were sharply lower. These results from Muslim populations are even more striking when they are contrasted with the results of a seven-nation Pew survey from 2006 in which self-identified Christian respondents were asked if they identified with their country or their religion. As Table 8.2 shows, all the Western countries had majorities declaring greater identification with their country, large majorities in all but the United States. Only Nigerian Christians expressed greater affinity for their faith, but still in substantially fewer numbers than Nigerian Muslims. In India, the Pew survey found only 10 per cent of Hindus who identified first with Hinduism compared to 90 per cent who identified themselves first as Indians. The Pew surveys reveal the continuing salience of Islamic identity among large numbers of ordinary Muslims around the world. This finding is confirmed by other surveys as well, including Gallup polls in several Muslim countries in 2001 and between 2005 and 2007, which found large majorities (often exceeding 90 per cent) indicating ‘that religion is an important part of their daily lives’ (Esposito and Mogahed, 2007: 5). The Pew data do not directly support, however, any claims about the presence or power of pan-Islamic loyalties among Muslims today. The surveys did not ask, for example, if the Muslim respondents



Table 8.1


197

France Germany Nigeria Russia Spain UK US

Country’s people

Christian

Both equally

Other

Don’t know/ refused

83 59 43 63 60 59 48

14 33 53 16 14 24 42

3 8 3 20 21 8 7

* 1 0 1 4 7 1

* * 1 1 1 2 2

* = less than 1 per cent

felt part of a global Muslim umma, and if so, in what concrete ways such identification affected them spiritually, culturally or politically. So we must be careful not to infer that because a majority of respondents answered they identify with Islam more than their country they would be ready to act on such identities in support of Muslims in other countries or of ‘Muslim causes’ in international politics, especially when such support challenges their country’s official policies. In other words, one should not confuse identity with loyalty. Moreover, the Pew surveys do not rule out the possibility that other identities, regional or tribal, for example, supersede both Islamic and national identities. This possibility is in fact supported by an eightnation survey conducted by Zogby International in March and April 2002 (Zogby, 2002: 49–59). In each country, Arab respondents were asked to rank the following six identity markers in the order of importance to them personally: family, the city or region where they live, the country in which they live, their religion, being Arab, and the social background of their family. They were asked to respond first as if they were defining their identity to a fellow Arab and second as if they were doing so to an American. In both cases, the respondents ranked Arabness, country and religion as the top three sources of their identity. The percentages choosing each of these three markers as their first choice in both questions are presented together in Table 8.3. The Zogby surveys do not separate Muslim from Christian respondents, so especially in the cases of Egyptians and Lebanese, we cannot assume that figures for ‘religion’ reflect exclusively Islamic identity. In general, however, the large majority of respondents in all countries except Lebanon were presumably Muslim. National identities continue



Table 8.2 Christian versus national identity (2006, per cent of respondents).

198 Sohail H. Hashmi Table 8.3 Identity markers among Arab populations (to an Arab/to an American) (2002, per cent of respondents).

Arab Country Religion

31/40 29/34 26/25 17/14 29/26 36/28

32/30 31/42 20/16

24/30 24/19 13/20

31/42 19/20 15/18

36/26 15/7 34/53

42/59 46/58 13/6 9/8 18/22 16/18

to rank lower than religious identities in most of the countries surveyed, but the gap between the two is large only in Israel and Morocco. Yet Arabness conspicuously trumps both religion and country in all countries except Israel and Morocco, where some degree of ambivalence is manifest. This Zogby poll does not allow us to conclude that pan-Arabism as an ideology is still a vital force among Arabs or that it is more appealing to Arabs than pan-Islam. It, together with the Pew surveys, reveals at most that after more than a half-century of state-building efforts in Muslimmajority states, national identities still lag behind (sometimes far behind) ethnicity (in the case of Arabs) and religion as sources of identity. In sum, we may say that at the interhuman level, popular identities in the Arab world leave open the possibility of a regional international society supported by shared ethnic and religious affinities. In the broader Muslim world, the potential for pan-Islamic affinities and action exists on the basis of the strong religious self-identification of large numbers of Muslims.

3 Conclusion: pan-Islam and international society in the Middle East and beyond The central question underlying this chapter has been whether Islam strengthens or undermines the prospects for a regional society in the Middle East. With every country in the region except Israel and Lebanon having predominantly Muslim populations, the immediate response might be to see in Islam an important, if not crucial, religious and cultural glue for regional society. Indeed, as we have seen, Islamic ethics places a great deal of emphasis on strengthening the bonds among Muslims at all levels, including the political. Politically, therefore, Islam should also provide an impetus towards the formation of a regional society in the Middle East.



Most Egypt Israel Lebanon Jordan Kuwait Morocco Saudi UAE important Arabia

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Yet, historically and today, Islam has proven insufficient and in some ways averse to the development of a regional society, in the Middle East or other regions. The reason has both an ethical/ideological as well as a practical component. On the ethical or ideological level, political Islam tends towards pan-Islamic ideals and institutions, and these pan-Islamic aspirations tend towards universalism. This is not to say that Islam has not been used to legitimate less than universal political arrangements. Indeed, throughout Islamic history, principalities and empires found many an ardent defender among Muslim scholars. Muslim nation-states today face far less opposition on Islamic grounds than 50 or 60 years ago, certainly not from mainstream Muslim scholars and activists, and not even from radical groups. Islamic fundamentalism has generally embraced the nation-state as having at least partial utility and legitimacy. Its goal is not to eliminate the nation-state, but to seize it for itself. The withering away of the state and the coming of a pan-Islamic utopia are historical stages only vaguely outlined in fundamentalist ideologies. Groups such as Hizb al-Tahrir that make establishment of a universal caliphate their central mission are treated as fringe elements even by other fundamentalist groups. Still, pan-Islamic urges remain alive today. Perhaps they will exist as long as Muslims exist. The nation-state has acquired some measure of Islamic respectability, but it cannot be said that ethically or ideologically it has entirely supplanted larger, more universal Islamic units. Phrased differently, nationalism has gained in Islamic legitimacy, but it has not replaced Islamic identities or the ideal of the umma. As interstate and transnational forms of pan-Islam demonstrate, the ideal is expressed today primarily in pluralist rather than solidarist forms, but there are constant expressions of hope that more solidarist forms may evolve. Thus, in terms of Islamic values, regionalism could be seen as a state of limbo: Muslims should pause there only long enough to reach the more inclusive paradise. On the practical level, pan-Islam has proven no more effective than pan-Arabism in mobilising elites and masses to create alternatives to the nation-state. It is one thing to imagine political communities, quite another to replace existing ones, especially those commanding the coercive machinery of the modern state. The modern Middle Eastern and Muslim nation-state, labouring though it might under multiple contradictions, has still proven remarkably adaptable and resilient. Unable to achieve a clear idea of what constitutes an Islamic alternative to the nation-state or how to bring it about, advocates of pan-Islam seem by and large reconciled for the time being to symbolic, pluralist manifestations.




Finally, a brief comment on the role of Islam and pan-Islam specifically in the global international society. Starting with the Iranian revolution and bolstered by the emergence of what some call the ‘global jihadi network’, a popular view has developed that Islam is irreconcilably opposed to an international society built on the peaceful coexistence and cooperation of sovereign states. Some Muslims undeniably share this view and act on it. But in a global population of 1.3 billion they are a conspicuous minority. Pan-Islam, in its myriad forms today, is focused on cultivating an international society of Muslims; the universal international society receives very little attention, except insofar as it threatens the development of an Islamic subsystem. The OIC’s commitment to the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law found in its first charter and reaffirmed in its second is more than mere rhetoric.

Note 1. This essay was made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. In addition to my fellow contributors to this volume, I thank Peter Mandaville for his assistance.




Order and Change in the Middle East: A Neo-Gramscian Twist on the International Society Approach Raymond Hinnebusch

Introduction The Middle East states system has persisted for close to a century, with borders of states little changed from its founding; yet the region is conflict-ridden, even ‘Hobbesian’, with repeated efforts to forge security regimes having foundered. A fractured sort of regional international society – with understood practices such as sovereignty, diplomacy and power-balancing – exists, but it is riddled with norm dissensus, its very legitimacy contested, with periodic wars, revolutions and interventions seeking to remake or defend this order. Its development is arguably best understood by combining the ‘international society’ and neo-Gramscian approaches. The structure of regional order is best understood through the lens of the international society approach, especially as systematised and elaborated by Buzan (2004). It guides the analyst in adumbrating the normative, intersubjective understandings and practices that constitute regional institutions. States’ international behaviour is constrained and their identities, hence, how they perceive their interests, are partly constituted by their membership in regional ‘international society’ and partly by the sub/transstate actors that comprise what Buzan calls ‘interhuman society’. In analysing international society, we explain how it imparts normative order to a states system and also how norm dissensus can open the door to disorder. Change in an order can, at one level, be understood as an outcome of normative conflict but such conflict must itself be understood in its 201



9

relation with material structures. While it is problematic to differentiate the normative and material, since in any concrete social formation the two are intertwined, the analytical distinction allows us to unpack the different components of a social structure. Buzan speculates on whether the realist notion of an international system is the material counterpart of international society, and whether the world capitalist economy is that of ‘world society’. Wallerstein’s idea of a world system shaped by the interaction of both the core–periphery economic division of labour and the interstate balance of power can usefully be seen as the material analogue or infrastructure, in Marxist thinking, of ‘international society’. At the level of particular institutions, the practice of balancing against threats can be seen as an institution of international society while the actual distribution of military resources constitutes its material side. Such distinctions allow analysis of how the interaction of ideational and material factors explains stability and change. In neo-Gramscian analysis (Cox, 1996), the long-term stability of structures of material inequality is thought to depend on ideological hegemony: thus, a stable ‘international society’ would incorporate norms and practices congruent with and legitimating the distribution of world material power in Wallerstein’s (1974) ‘world system’. Agents normally reproduce a social order, but when contradictions emerge between the material structure and its normative legitimation, actors – social movements or states – have incentives and opportunities to put forth projects challenging the existing order (Joseph, 2008). Where no (legitimised) hegemonic order has been established, as in the Middle East, several norms will be in conflict and will be promoted by rival agents in their power struggles; the normative project which most successfully mobilises material resources (numbers, guns) or is deployed by a state enjoying a material power advantage can normally be expected to prevail. The particular kind of international society established then constrains states and shapes states’ conceptions of their interests, until such time as its incongruence with material conditions undermines it. The differentiation between the regional and the global levels identifies another nexus of stability and change. Regional orders, as Buzan and Wæver argue (2003: 6–26), are not mere extensions of a relatively ‘thin’ global international society, but are at least partly constituted ‘bottom upward’, reflective of thicker regionally specific variations in interhuman society (culture, identity). Yet, while Middle East states help make their own regional international society, they do so in conditions not of their own making – but rather in the context of the unequal distribution of material power between core and periphery within the world



202 Raymond Hinnebusch

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system. Additionally, the norms of global international society, reflective of this material ‘world system’, are systematically exported to all regions where they encounter indigenous counterparts. When, as in the Middle East, there is the substantial contradiction between the material structure of the world system and the dominant norms of regional interhuman society (transstate movements, supra-state identities), the construction of regional international society is contested between core and periphery and their struggle is a main source of instability in a region.

1 The structure of the Middle East order The material infrastructure The Middle East regional system, largely imposed from without by Western imperialism, constitutes the specific material context within which a regional international society has had to be constructed. The Middle East was incorporated into the world division of labour as a primary product exporter, new local classes were constructed through unequal appropriation of the sources of wealth – land and oil – and economic dependence on the core generated shared interests and a corresponding political clientage between ‘the core of the core and the core of the periphery’ (Galtung, 1971). At the same time, a very flawed states system was imposed on the ruins of what had been a universalistic empire, shattering regional economic interdependence and creating a multitude of weak and insecure states. The arbitrary imposition of boundaries, often incongruent with identity, diluting loyalties to individual states, sustained previous sub- and supra-state identities and fostered irredentist movements. The creation of small super-rich mini-states controlling much of the region’s oil alongside larger dissatisfied ones generated power imbalances and revisionism that made the Gulf an enduring conflict zone. The implantation of a land-hungry Israel at the expense of indigenous Palestinians and the exclusion of Kurds from statehood created two centres of intense irredentism. The ‘inside-out’ geopolitical structure of the system weakened it: unlike regions organised around a powerful centre (for example China-centred East Asia), the Middle East is centred on a fragmented core made up of weak, initially pre-modern territorial states sharing an Arab identity and a periphery of more or less hostile stronger and more modern non-Arab states (Iran, Turkey and Israel); tied together by conflict, they constitute a ‘security complex’ but only the thinnest of international societies. The rise of an Arab regional hegemon that might have shaped effective Arabic-centric institutions was obstructed by both regional



Order and Change in the Middle East

power-balancing and periodic external intervention (Huntington, 1996; Lustik, 1997). Three outcomes of the imperial era became permanent issues of contestation, around which local agents have mobilised in efforts to restructure the core–periphery relation, provoking regular counter-intervention: (a) the forced fragmentation of the Arab world, consigning it to a subaltern rank in the global hierarchy with the result, as Buzan (1991) remarks, that it is the only classic civilisation that has not managed to reconstruct itself as a global great power in the post-colonial era; (b) the creation of a perceived regional ‘bridgehead’ of the core, Israel, which is kept a regional military superpower; (c) an ongoing struggle over control of the ‘world’ oil resources concentrated in the Middle East which revisionist regional actors see as a resource usable to redress the power imbalance against the region. The significant incongruence between the imposed material system and nationalist norms at the human society level (derived from Arab and Islamic identities) built chronic revisionism into the system. However, it is shifts in the distribution of material power that opens and closes space for revisionist political entrepreneurs to deploy these norms to promote indigenous visions of regional ‘international society’. Three kinds of material shifts have been important: (1) The global power balance: Because intervention by the hegemon of the time is required to enforce system maintenance, its relative likelihood determines windows of opportunity for revisionism. The Cold War shift in the global power balance to bipolarity (in checking such intervention), and the simultaneous rise of anti-imperialist third worldism, enabled Nasser to attempt construction of a regionalcentric pan-Arab order in place of that imposed from without; conversely, post-Cold War unipolarity deprived later Arab nationalist imitators (Saddam Hussein) of space for such challenges. (2) Economics: from etatist modernisation to oil rentierism: revisionist Arab nationalism enjoyed credibility during the period of import substitute industrialisation, economic expansion and redistributive reforms pioneered by Nasserite Egypt and imitated in the other authoritarian republics; but this strategy was exhausted by the late seventies, with Egypt’s economy sapped by the debilitating conflict with Israel. Then the regional balance of forces was shuffled by the enormous rent accruing to regional oil-producing states from the creation of OPEC, nationalisation of oil companies and 1974 oil-price explosion, captured by Heikal’s (1975) image of a move from thawra




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(revolution) to tharwa (literally resources, but implying patrimonial rentierism). In the short term, this appeared to empower Arabism (via the oil weapon) and foster Arab regional integration. In the medium term it had the opposite effect in materially consolidating individual states (through rent-funded co-optation of the previously pan-Arab middle classes); further attaching the interests of the oil monarchies to the world market, hence away from the Arab world; and shifting regional influence from Egypt’s radical political leadership to the deradicalising influence of Saudi money which funded the spread of Islamic movements to contest pan-Arabism. The following decade and a half of low oil prices meant that the raised expectations of the masses were frustrated, making them recruits for more radical Islamic movements. (3) War: The Middle East is the one region where periodic wars over regional hegemony are still conducted, with the winner, when there is one, seemingly well positioned to impose its own norms. The outcomes of regional wars (including subsequent peace agreements), reflective of the raw military power of the moment, have shifted the balance of material power against some norms and to the advantage of others. While the outcome of the 1956 Suez War empowered pan-Arabism, generally, war drove a creeping ‘Westphalianisation’ of the states system and the empowerment of the institution of sovereignty over that of pan-Arabism. The Arab defeat of 1967 undermined pan-Arabism and the 1973 war gave it a missed last chance, thereafter leaving the normative field to pan-Islam. Lost wars empowered realist leaders to subordinate the dangerous pursuit of identity-based ideology to reason of state (sovereignty and security). War, together with oil, led to national security states, arms races and classic power-balancing. On the other hand, the failure of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its 2000 withdrawal, in part owing to Iranian funding and arming of Hizbullah, gave new credibility to radical versions of Islamic militancy; the 2003 US attack on Iraq and 2006 Israeli attack on Hizbullah were failed efforts to use raw material power to reverse the empowerment of militant Islam. What is striking is that victors in regional wars have never succeeded in translating military power into hegemony (legitimate leadership); instead, wars leave issues unsettled and lead to more wars. Actors and change Actors are comprised of the global hegemon(s), regional states, and social movements in conflict over material interests – power, territory and





resources (oil) – and promoting conflicting identities and legitimating ideologies. Out of the struggle of these actors emerge the institutions and norms of regional international society.

The world hegemons (UK, US) incorporated the region and its resources into the world system that they have dominated and periodically intervene to turn back challenges to it. But they have failed to establish their hegemony and the Middle East is the one region that, in Islam, still has a counter-hegemonic ideology. Challenging the works of the hegemon(s) are the social movements fostered in Middle East ‘interhuman society’ which tend to be deeply irredentist/revisionist because of the damage inflicted by the West on the region and aggravated by subsequent Western interventions. Pan-Arab movements mobilised the new middle class in the fifties/sixties against the semi-liberal landed-commercial oligarchs and challenged the West’s neo-imperial order in the region. By the seventies, political Islam was mobilising the urban lower middle classes; it became a functional surrogate for and expressed many of the unresolved grievances formerly championed by secular Arab nationalism. State-centred loyalties (state nationalism or liberalism) had no comparable mobilisable potential in the Arab world; hence the main competitors to supra-state identity were substate irredentist movements such as Kurdish nationalism (except in the non-Arab states, where state identities dominated). It is when trans/supra-state social movements attain state power or acquire a state patron, that they are able to challenge the system. Major episodes of change in regional ‘international society’ resulted when social movements overthrew incumbent oligarchies and established radical regimes that not only contested existing institutions/norms, but also, in consolidating material modernisation of the state apparatus and nationally mobilising populations, upset power balances. Thus, Nasser’s populist revolution empowered the Egyptian state against its oligarchic and monarchic competitors and contested unqualified sovereignty in the name of pan-Arab identity. Revolutionary Iran mobilised political Islam to challenge American hegemony in the region, the monarchic pro-Western order in the Gulf and Israeli dominance in the Levant (via Hizbullah). Saddam Hussein challenged the eccentric boundaries that made for a lopsided distribution of regional oil reserves. Such revolutionary challenges typically resulted in interstate wars (1967, 1980) or hegemonic counter-revolutionary intervention (1991).



Hegemons vs social movements

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Where revisionist states have failed, new transstate movements have emerged to fill the gap. Hizbullah, though in a relation of interdependency with Syria and Iran, is autonomous, combining ideology and prowess in asymmetric warfare. Status quo regimes may also use material power to spread a conservative normative discourse, notably Saudi (and American) financing of Islamism; but this famously morphed in Afghanistan into a radical transstate network (al Qaeda) that found substitute means of finance (private donors, drug trade) allowing it to challenge its original state patrons. Revisionist states and movements can only prevail if they have both a normative discourse with universalistic appeal (able to bridge regional fragmentation) and such material capabilities. Regional states and international society States are major agents in creating regional international society, and the kind of society is affected by the kind of state; it is because Middle East states vary so much both in orientation and in level of consolidation, that the kind of international society has been so fluid and contested. First, Middle Eastern regimes have been set on contrary procore status quo and anti-imperialist revisionist tangents depending on whether they were established during the external imposition of the regional system or grew out of rebellion against it; whether state formation relatively satisfied dominant identities or frustrated them; and by the subsequent incorporation (through revolution) or exclusion of revisionist social forces into states. Regime divergence initially took the form of rivalry between traditional monarchies backed by the global core and radical populist republics growing out of revolution against it, and although subsequent wars and the oil boom drove some convergence in the social composition and orientation of all states in a conservative direction, other factors – such as the persistence of irredentism – keep aspects of the initial cleavage alive (Hinnebusch, 2003: 74–5). Second, because state formation has been very uneven, regional states have also varied along a pre-modern/modern continuum. The Arab states were born ‘pre-modern’ materially weak, threatened from within, vulnerable to transstate movements and sensitive to the implications of supra-state identity for domestic legitimacy. Certain states that got a head start in consolidation through the incorporation of social forces, via nationalism, democracy or revolution, and facing weaker pre-modern states, had the potential to establish themselves as hegemons exporting supra-state non-Westphalian notions of international society (Egypt under Nasser; Iran under Khomeini) or, alternatively, to pursue military expansion




(Israel, Iraq), which tended to drive Westphalianisation. As other states, driven to defensive modernisation, also consolidated themselves, they came to be mostly threatened from without and more likely to create a ‘realist’ order based on power-balancing and sovereignty. The movement of Middle East states in material terms from pre-modern to modern and in orientation from revisionist towards status quo drives the regional system in this direction, but the persisting incongruity of identity and territory (nation and state) in the Arab world retards the consolidation of their modernity and hence of a Westphalian order. Finally, it has to be underlined that states are not simply actors, but are also sites of contestation between the superior material power of global international society and sub/transstate movements that continue to demand resistance to the increasingly intrusive core; this struggle determines how far regional international society adopts the institutions of its global counterpart. Regional international society: norms and institutions The stability of the institutions of regional international society depends on congruence with material capabilities, while these institutions in turn shape the behaviour of regional actors. Where global-centred and regional-specific institutions conflict, the material context is likely to determine their relative constitutive power. Sovereignty and nationalism Having initially developed through the expansion of global international society, regional international society in the Middle East shares many institutions and norms with the global core (see Chapter 10). The model of the sovereign territorial state in which the government achieves control over its territory, was accepted as a norm by regional state-builders from the time of the Ottoman tanzimat and most states now approximate this ‘modern’ model. The building of armies with modern firepower and penetrative civil bureaucracies bypassing intermediary gatekeepers, plus the recent availability of revenues from rent, were all major material factors giving substance to the institution of internal sovereignty. Also widely embraced was the principle of national self-determination: that people who feel they are a nation should have (ideally one) state, and people who inhabit a state ought to feel they are a nation. When this is not so, nation-builders actively seek to generate national consciousness within state boundaries and/or embrace irredentist projects to redraw them. The main problem in the Middle East is that too many states were born artificial, with borders cutting across pre-existing




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sub- and supra-state identities, fragmenting the potential ‘Arab nation’ into multiple states or leaving stateless ‘nations’ (Palestinians, Kurds). While there is considerable variation in the extent of incongruity between territory and identity in the Middle East, where it is substantial, disaffection and instability are pervasive, an indicator of how deeply the idea of the nation-state was widely accepted in regional international society. Since the individual territorial states of the region, backed by global hegemons, stand against a redesign of incongruous borders a certain cleavage between material power and societal norms is built into the regional system. Wendt (1999) argues that sovereignty, institutionalising reciprocity and equality among states, limits conflict; however, this is only so where the sovereign state (with its material power and territory) and the nation (seat of identity and legitimacy) are congruent. In good part owing to the weakness of nation-state congruence and the power of supra-state identity in the region, sovereignty is regarded relatively instrumentally by state elites as a defence against stronger states while its internalisation as a norm prohibiting non-intervention and sanctifying inter-Arab state boundaries is weaker than in other regions. It still matters because the presumption is that, in the normal conduct of affairs, states respect each other’s sovereignty, but in crises this presumption may well not hold. Where a balance of deterrent power exists, sovereignty takes on more real substance, but where this is lacking, it has periodically required intervention by the superior material power of global hegemons to institutionalise the rule that boundaries are sacrosanct. Without this, many boundaries would have long ago been redrawn to better reflect identity: more than that, artificial colonial creations, notably buffer states (Jordan), contested states (Lebanon) and oil mini-states (the Gulf sheikhdoms) would have been totally absorbed by stronger neighbours such as Iraq whose 1990 annexation of Kuwait could only be reversed by massive outside intervention. Arabism and Islam The most distinctive feature of the Middle East region, setting it apart from global international society, is the power of supra-state identities. The regional order first evolved, Barnett (1998) argues, by the interactions of state actors deploying rival norms – sovereignty, the dominant norm at the level of global international society and Arabism, the dominant identity at the level of regional interhuman society. The variations in emergent identities in individual states corresponded to their material interests: for example those states imposed from or supported from without tended to promote sovereignty, those formed out of revolutions from




below initially promoted supra-state alternatives. The normative contest took place both within intra-elite arenas such as Arab League summits and within individual states between rival social movements. While this was a contest of discourses – alternative visions of legitimacy – its material context was crucial: in times of weak states, bipolarity, subaltern class mobilisation and victories over hostile external forces, such as the Suez War, the balance tilted towards Arabism, and in periods of hegemonic intervention, defeat of nationalist states in war and oil-funded state consolidation it tilted towards sovereignty. With the decline of Arabism, political Islam became a substitute supra-state identity, promoted by the availability of rent-funded financing for Islamic transstate movements. Both supra-state identities were established as distinctive primary institutions of the region, which, to an extent, compete with each other and also with sovereignty; yet, because they all share the norm of selfdetermination from the core, they can be reconciled in theory and various such compromises have been attempted. The agendas of pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements readily converge (indeed merge – Hizbullah) against outside intervention. Pan-Arab and pan-Islamic norms can be said to merely qualify rather than deny the sovereignty of regional states, only constraining pursuit of undiluted reason of state and establishing an appropriate role for an Arab or Islamic state, namely taking account in their foreign policies of the interests of the larger supra-state community, above all defence of the region against external threats. Reconciling these potentially contrary primary institutions is the mission of the two main secondary institutions in the region, the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Both accept the principle of sovereignty yet membership in each is contingent on a supra-state identity. Both institutions are widely regarded as weak, perhaps because so much is expected of them: to institutionalise identitybased norms in order to overcome the fragmentation that has made the Arab/Islamic world/s so vulnerable to intervention by global hegemons or to threats from other states. However, like any IGO, they have no means of collective action and their effectiveness depends on the cooperation of member states – concentrations of material power that alone can act. But states are only likely to cooperate when they share material interests, and actual material (notably economic) interdependence between Arab and Islamic states is thin. On the contrary, as in Galtung’s model, the states are embedded in core–periphery material structures that obstruct periphery–periphery material links and tend to enervate the transstate identities they share. Similarly, neither Arab nor Islamic states share security interests, except




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to the extent that the former were brought together in the Arab League against Israel or Iran; indeed concerting policies towards Israel, such as the economic boycott, and legitimation of the PLO as representatives of the Palestinians, were the main achievements of the Arab League (and the OIC has not even managed this much). Collective action has increasingly been diluted as more Arab states came to rely on the very US hegemon that is Israel’s patron and is seen by a minority of states and much of public opinion as little less a threat than Israel or Iran. Nasser’s Egypt acquired, for a period, the regional hegemony to overcome these obstacles and enforce a regional regime; yet while it briefly enjoyed pan-Arab moral hegemony it never enjoyed corresponding material (military, economic) capabilities. Reflective of the growing Arab fragmentation after Egypt’s expulsion from the League for its separate peace with Israel, was the decline in the effectiveness of Arab summits in the eighties when they were often boycotted by key feuding states. To some extent, Saudi Arabia filled the inter-Arab vacuum, using financial incentives agreed at summits to preserve some cohesion or to heal splits. The paralysis of the League in the Gulf War led to its subsequent decline, parallel to the normative shift towards sovereignty. It is still the case, however, that while sovereignty is reasonably established at the interstate level where it corresponds to the material interests of state elites, at the level of ‘interhuman’ regional society, both sub- and supra-state identities retain such power that identification with regional states is diluted and legitimacy deficits are consequently typical; that sovereignty is weak at the societal level is indicated by the fact that plebeian social forces that seize state power typically show little respect for boundaries – until these new elites are socialised, by Western intervention or war, into the norm of sovereignty. At the interhuman level the norm that Arab/Islamic states should act together against Western penetration and intervention and against its perceived ‘bridgehead’, Israel, clashes with the presumption of sovereignty that states legitimately put their own individual interests first. It is just this fragmentation and disunity of the Arab and Islamic states that is widely seen as the root cause of external domination. The result is that for transstate movements contesting entrenched regimes, supra-state identities are powerful mobilisational tools. It is, however, true that transstate movements increasingly seek less to overthrow the states system than to indigenise – that is Islamise – it from below. This is a symptom that the states system has, over time, become more acceptable or is at least seen as an irreversible fait accompli even in interhuman society, and the material power of states is a prize




transstate movements seek to seize. Once they do so they tend themselves to be ‘statised’ – infamously the fate of Ba’thism, with rival Syrian and Iraqi Ba’th regimes becoming themselves obstacles to pan-Arabism. Broader supra-state identities are also weakened by competition among them (between Arab and Islamic identity and within the latter Sunni vs Shi‘i) and by lesser loyalties at the state and substate levels. The multiplicity of identities obstructs efforts by political entrepreneurs to indigenise and bring regional international society into greater congruence with interhuman societal norms. Anti-imperialism and great power management Great power management has been an enduring feature of regional international society, congruent with the core–periphery hierarchy of material power, although it has seldom enjoyed legitimacy in regional interhuman society, except in the rare instances when it has been seen as benign (as in some peace processes). On the other hand, the powerful persistence of anti-imperialist revisionism in the Middle East, long after it has become obsolete in the rest of the post-colonial third world, suggests anti-imperialism is, itself, an institution of regional international society, derivative of nationalism. The rival constitutive power of great power management and anti-imperialism has been shaped by the material context. Anti-imperialist nationalism as an institution served, notably under Nasser, to dilute great power management but only because this was an era of bipolarity when countervailing power meant none of the great powers could any longer bring their material power fully to bear in the region, as the outcome of the Suez War demonstrated. Subsequently, state elites have accepted, even welcomed, great power management, especially those states firmly linked in the core–periphery hierarchy and as pan-Arabism proved impotent to resolve collective security problems and the enduring Arab–Israeli and Gulf conflicts. The US keeps Israel so militarily superior to its Arab neighbours that they cannot dispense with a US role in restraining Israel or brokering a peace settlement. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait brutally exposed the impotence of the Arab League to manage inter-Arab conflicts in the face of Saddam’s massive military machine while the weak states of the Gulf lack the material capacity to defend themselves, without which sovereignty remains relatively theoretical. Thus, the region has little alternative to some form of great power management. But disagreement persists over Western efforts, enabled by the post-bipolar absence of countervailing power, to make sovereignty conditional on acceptance of Western-defined global norms. Indeed,




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sovereignty, diplomacy and international law are embraced as normative shields against great power intervention. For this reason, Middle East states (Israel apart) were long enthusiastic supporters of the UN. However, the increasing ability of the US hegemon under unipolarity to deploy the Security Council against what it designates as Middle Eastern ‘rogue’ states or to paralyse it on behalf of Israel means the UN accords the region declining voice and security, undermining regional support for this pivotal secondary institution of international society. Some of the continuing incongruity between the Middle East and global neoliberal norms is rooted in materially different levels of development, hence power positions in the world hierarchy. Middle East ideologies of revolution and populism expressed the rise of new classes demanding equality (such as emerged in the West in a similar stage of its development). Similarly, the neo-mercantilist ideology and neo-patrimonial state-building practices of the region express the position of late-developing, partially rentier states, in a highly competitive global economy. Anti-imperialist nationalism is a reaction to enormous core–periphery inequalities while political Islam contests the neoliberal drive to dis-embed markets from community and prioritise material consumption and individualism.

2 Change in Middle East regional society The Middle East regional order is the outcome of an ongoing struggle between the largely material power of core international society (and its regional allies), which initially shaped and currently defend it, and regional interhuman society, expressed in social movements, and radical states where movements take power, which have attempted to indigenise it. Hence, far from static, the region has undergone constant change. Four relatively distinct if overlapping versions of regional international society, in which a particular set of norms and practices has dominated, can be identified. The following analysis will focus on the Arab core, largely considering the non-Arab states only insofar as they interact with it. As will be seen, each successive experiment has been exhausted without reaching a stabilising congruence between material and normative factors. Prelude to regional international society: from imperialism to precarious independence The expansion of Western international society into the Middle East was the outcome of uneven capitalist development and a consequent sharp




military imbalance against the region. While some local actors were coopted into and took advantage of this process, only the material coercion of imperialism made it possible: its defeat of Muslim armies; its repression of chronic rebellion (for example use of aerial bombardment of tribes and villages and of cannon against cities); its definition of boundaries; and its establishment of client elites with a material stake in the new order (great estates, state office). Western nationalism and defensive modernisation were embraced in the region as the key to the material power needed to expel the West. But nationalism was impotent as long as it was confined to small groups of intellectuals and only became an effective material force when embraced by rising classes that had an interest in contesting imperialism and who organised in parties capable of mobilising numbers, or in the case of Atatürk’s Turkey, inherited the remnants of an army. Only then was it able to both delegitimise imperialism and make occupation too costly since, with few exceptions, the imperial powers sought a low-cost rule through co-optation. Imperialism became unsustainable as Britain and France were impoverished in two world wars and their global and regional dominance challenged by the emerging superpowers. Nevertheless, in key states, Great Britain established and left behind dependent regimes. Having won power in the individual states, the new postindependence elites embraced the norm of sovereignty, combined with liberal nationalism, as a defence of their interests against the core/imperial powers, local rivals and transstate popular movements. To reconcile state-centric nationalism with often stronger supra-state identities, head off demands for pan-Arab unity and appease popular demands to co-ordinate the common defence of Palestine, they established the Arab League. The failure to defend Palestine, delegitimised the oligarchic regimes and gave impetus to more radical notions of Arabism that identified the divisions among the Arab states as the root of Arab weakness. This public dissatisfaction with artificial boundaries coincided with unfulfilled Hashemite ambitions – Iraq’s dreams of becoming an Arab Prussia unifying the Fertile Crescent and Jordan’s Greater Syria scheme – which stimulated a defensive counter-coalition by those threatened, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia: Westphalian balancing against threats had become an institution. Before long, the limited military capabilities of the Arab regimes and their shared dynastic/oligarchic ideology brought all states to accept the rules of a multipolar system – that no state should endanger the vital interests of its neighbours – an embryonic international society (Maddy-Weizman, 1993).




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This order was, however, soon aborted by a confluence of several forces. Narrow-based oligarchic regimes suffering delegitimation lacked the institutional and material capacity to absorb the rising nationalist mobilisation of the middle class, which embraced versions of Arab or Islamic identity (manifest in Ba’thism and the Muslim Brotherhood), as the most effective weapons against the oligarchic order, and especially as they infiltrated the army and captured the coercive apparatus from the oligarchs. The old regimes’ legitimacy deficits were deepened by association with the declining imperial powers’ effort to protect their special interests – oil, treaty rights, bases – by incorporating the region into a West-centric security scheme, the Baghdad Pact. In the early fifties, the last needed ingredient to transform the system emerged, a charismatic leader wielding an ideology enjoying transstate appeal. Pan-Arabism: transstate norms, regional hegemony and an ‘Arab regime’ (1956–67) With the onset of the Cold War, the Arab world split over how to respond to Western attempts to institutionalise a post-imperial security regime in the region – at a time when the recent creation of Israel was widely seen as the work of the West. While the pro-Western Hashemite regimes embraced this project, Nasser of Egypt saw it as a form of neo-imperialism and advocated an alternative Arab Collective security pact. Nasser sought successfully to mobilise the Arab ‘street’ to pressure recalcitrant governments from below. His emergence from the 1956 Suez War as a popular Arab hero and the 1958 overthrow of the pro-Western Iraqi regime established a powerful pan-Arab norm against foreign treaties and bases. Thereafter, Nasser’s potent appeal to the populations of other states made overt alignment with the West an enormous legitimacy liability, as least where the middle class was politically mobilising. Nasser inspired or lent his appeal to Arab nationalist movements which overthrew oligarchies in a number of states and established similar Arab nationalist regimes, ostensibly committed to the same norms. The rise of Nasser set in train an ongoing inter-Arab contest in which leaders, defending themselves from internal opposition or ambitious for pan-Arab leadership, trumpeted their own Arab credentials and impugned those of rivals. As Barnett convincingly argues, this competition, though intense, was quite different from a conventional ‘realist’ power struggle. It was not chiefly over territory or other material assets but over the desired normative order of the Arab system, while the typical currency in this struggle was not military power but the legitimacy derived from being perceived to observe the norms and play roles




grounded in Arabism (Barnett, 1998: 2, 6, 16; Noble, 1991: 61). Even if Arabism was manipulated more to serve the interests of states than to advance all-Arab interests, this competition tended, Barnett argues, to establish norms of behaviour that constrained all states. Even Nasser, the main architect of the pan-Arab order, found that he, too, was bound by it, so long as he wished to retain his pan-Arab leadership. The outcome was that, for a period, Nasser was able to establish a sort of informal pan-Arab regime, under which Arab state foreign polices were expected to be governed by a common Arab interest as defined by Cairo, including independence from imperialism and its alliance systems, Arab unity and support of the Palestine cause. Pan-Arabism had been established as a hegemonic institution in the Arab world. Yet material factors were decisive in enabling the hegemony of Arabism. First, Nasser’s challenge was only possible because of the emergent bipolar world order. Previous such challenges during the period of British hegemony from Egypt, Iran and Iraq had been coercively defeated. However, the Cold War and weakening of the old imperial powers opened a brief window of opportunity in which countervailing Soviet power to some extent sheltered the Arab world from direct Western intervention or its full consequences, importantly enabling Nasser to survive the Suez War and mobilise much of the Arab world against Western imperialism. Equally important, for a brief period Nasser was able to impose Egyptian hegemony on the other Arab states, and although his ideological legitimacy was pivotal, it had a material side: Egypt’s pre-eminence derived from its stature as the most stable, coherent and largest of the Arab powers (with 30 per cent of the Arab population, the largest GNP and army) facing weak oligarchies and unstable military regimes in the other Arab states (Walt, 1987: 53; Noble, 1991: 61–5, 74–5). This coincidence of disunity in the core and temporary unity in the periphery briefly neutralised the normally debilitating effect of the core–periphery structure of world power on the region. Nasser’s pan-Arab regime was, however, inherently precarious, resting as it did chiefly on normative discourse and material conditions that were liable to shift. Arabism as an institution was beleaguered by conflicting interpretations (for example over the amount of uniformity in foreign policies, the extent of permissible relations with the West, the degree of militancy on Israel/Palestine) and Arab states threatened by Nasser took to anti-hegemonic ideological balancing against him, championing the more state-centric version of Arabism which banned intervention in the affairs of other Arab states. Against Arab nationalism, Saudi Arabia deployed an alternative supra-state identity compatible




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with its regime legitimacy, namely pan-Islam, leading the founding of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) that brought in non-Arab states sharing Riyadh’s view of communism, not the West, as the main threat. When this often failed in the face of popular movements, Western intervention was still able to protect client states threatened by domestic pan-Arab movements – for example Jordan in 1957, Lebanon in 1958 – which was decisive in reversing the pan-Arab tide. But it was not just the pro-Western oligarchies that balanced against Egypt. Ironically the other radical nationalist states – Syria and Iraq – felt threatened by pan-Arab pressure to unify the Arab states since Nasser, the only leader with a mass following, would be sure to dominate a united state; hence these Arab regimes sacrificed pan-Arabism to the material stakes they had acquired in their individual states. Nasser’s rivals became more effective in defending their sovereignty as they began to consolidate control over their state apparatuses, the monarchies as their oil revenues grew, the new republican leaders as they learned to control their bases in the army. Pan-Arabism was strong enough that Egypt could use it to threaten other state elites, thereby exacerbating inter-Arab conflict, but not quite strong enough to force a long-term uniformity of goals, much less incorporation into a unified Arab state ruled from Cairo. At the same time, as the material costs to Egypt of hegemony rose, particularly in the Yemen War, Nasser was forced into periods of truce with his rivals. Finally, the practice by which each regime tried to establish its own panArab credentials led to their ‘out-bidding’ each other – advocating more demanding standards of Arabism. As each state tried to impugn the inaction of the other on behalf of the Palestine cause, the Arab leaders became ‘entrapped’ in unrealistic or risky commitments. This climaxed in the provocative rhetoric by which Syria and Egypt blundered into the 1967 war with Israel. Thus, Ba’thist Syria sought legitimacy against Nasser by sponsoring Palestinian fedayeen against Israel that created a crisis in May 1967. This drove Nasser to defend his pan-Arab leadership (protect Syria, challenge Israel) through dangerous brinkmanship that helped bring on the defeat of the main Arab nationalist states in 1967. Thus, the pan-Arab system itself generated the conditions that Israel exploited to launch the war that destroyed it (Smith, 1996: 171–4, 192). The 1967 war led to the collapse of Egyptian material and symbolic hegemony. Egypt’s hegemony had always been flawed and partial. Cairo had never enjoyed enough material resources to be an uncontested hegemon. It lacked the material superiority to use economic rewards and punishments; after 1967, indeed, Egypt became dependent on rivals whose financial resources came increasingly to much surpass it




(Saudi Arabia). Nor did it enjoy much capacity to project military power to enforce Arab nationalist norms (the one attempt to do so, in Yemen, ended in stalemate) or to defend the Arabs against external threats, especially Israel. State elites did not see the hegemon as providing public goods, but instead as a threat. Egypt’s hegemony was based largely on the public esteem Nasser enjoyed which depended on his defence of the Arab nation from perceived Western and Israeli threats; when the 1967 defeat destroyed his prestige, the ‘Arab regime’ lost its enforcer (Telhami, 1990).

An Arab ‘international society’? The Arab Triangle and the new oil order (1970s) If 1967 destroyed the Egypt-centred order, the preparation for and aftermath of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War shaped a new ‘intergovernmental’ version of pan-Arabism (Chapter 7). After Nasser’s death, Egypt no longer had enough assets to play the hegemon. In its place an axis of states – ‘The Arab Triangle’ – emerged (Ajami, 1977/78), made up of the largest (Egypt), richest (Saudi Arabia) and most pan-Arab (Syria) states; this was facilitated by the greater equality, hence trust, between the main leaders, Sadat, Assad and Faisal. In the absence of an enforcer, cohesion was attained by the dire need to co-ordinate against Israel with its demonstrated military supremacy and occupation of Arab lands and by consensus-building lubricated by oil money. In the 1973 war, Egypt and Syria co-ordinated their strategy while Saudi Arabia financed the military preparations and used the oil weapon. The prestige from the relative war success allowed them to constitute a leading centre for the Arab system empowered to forge an Arab consensus on war and peace (Taylor, 1982: 49–56). The new order combined acceptance of the sovereignty of the individual states with voluntary co-ordination on behalf of common interests, a return to the halfway house between pan-Arabism and ‘Westphalia’ initially established under the Arab League, but now with a concert of cohesive leading states to operationalise it. Pan-Arab norms had now to be defined by an inter-elite consensus, in which the interests of the individual states would inevitably be prioritised over the demands of transstate movements (Sela, 1998: 3–8); but the revival of Arab nationalism in the war made states’ legitimacy contingent on playing an Arab role. Arab summits became more significant in negotiating effective common strategies towards Israel but also became vehicles for ending the competitive outbidding driven by pan-Arabism that had proved so costly




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to state interests; now states used summits to engineer a mutual deflation of the standards of Arabism by legitimising peace negotiations with Israel and marginalising radical regimes (Iraq, Libya) which still sought to use outbidding against the peace process. In the early seventies, summits legitimised and set the conditions for a peace settlement with Israel (Sela, 1998: 75–94; Barnett, 1998: 122). Parallel to the move towards political concert was one towards economic integration, the absence of which was widely seen as the underlying reason for the failure of Nasser’s pan-Arab order. Identity and norms, to endure, must be congruent with economic structures, and the fragmentation of the regional market into state-bounded economies meant that pan-Arab norms had corresponded to no pan-Arab economy; on the contrary, the export of primary products to the ‘core’ pulled the economic interests of dominant classes (for example exporting landlords) out of correspondence with Arabism. Ironically, the etatist efforts of Arab nationalist states to break their economic dependence on the core had issued in only protected inward-looking economies and demolished the potential pan-Arab industrial bourgeoisie that might have had a stake in regional markets. Now, however, transstate economic ties proliferated from the post-war explosion in Arab oil wealth. The oil states transferred about 15 per cent of their capital surpluses to the non-oil Arab states (in the form of development or defence aid). Post-war infitah policies started to open state economies to external Arab investment and free trade agreements were signed. A massive labour migration from poor to rich states took place, with worker remittances flowing back to stimulate home-state economies. There was much talk about a division of labour in a pan-Arab market: the oil states had surplus capital, but little land and labour, while capital-poor states such as Egypt had skilled labour and an industrial infrastructure while Sudan and Syria had much agricultural land: joint ventures of Gulf capital in these states could effect an optimal combining of factors of production. The major joint venture investment was the joint Egyptian–Saudi Arab Military Industrial Organisation. Functionalist-like pan-Arab sectoral organisation also proliferated, for example the Arab Agricultural Development Organisation and the Arab Development Fund. This might have created the economic integration without which political integration cannot advance (Kerr and El-Sayed, 1982). This order enjoyed potential stability. The regimes had incorporated the middle classes and part of the masses, enjoyed some legitimacy from the 1973 war, had overcome ideological cleavages and had established some habits of trust and cooperation within the Arab League framework.




However, just as the conflict with Israel gave birth to the Arab Triangle, so disagreements over the conflict’s resolution destroyed it as, after the 1973 war, Egypt’s Sadat proceeded down the road to a separate peace. Egypt was not getting enough of the new Arab oil wealth to cure its economic crisis while the US was offering to replace Arab aid and secure the return of the Israeli-occupied Sinai if Egypt broke ranks and signed a separate peace. With such vital material interests as recovery of territory, perhaps even political survival at stake, Sadat opted for US dependency, and transstate Arabism was too weak to deter him. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, despite having wielded the oil weapon on behalf of the Arab cause, was in no position, despite its enormous oil wealth, to replace Egypt as a new Arab hegemon: lacking a minimum self-defence capability, it opted to address its insecurity through a massive upgrading of its security alliance with the US in return for recycling the bulk of its petrodollars to the West. Sadat’s move towards a separate peace had, from at least the mid-1970s, profoundly damaging consequences for the Arab system. First, while the Arabs as a bloc may have had the leverage to extract a comprehensive settlement with Israel, if no one of them settled for less, the US captured their two leading states, divided them and henceforth forced them to individually play weakened hands in peace negotiations. At the second Baghdad summit, Egypt was ostracised, forcing the core Arab state into further dependence on the US (Smith, 1996: 256–8). Second, the resulting shift in the power balance towards Israel generated deepened insecurity throughout the Arab world that stimulated a turn to self-help by the Arab states; if, in the 1973 war, cooperation between the Arab states benefited all, thereafter – caught in a classic prisoner’s dilemma – none could trust the other not to seek individual gains unilaterally. And, even as Egypt under Nasser had established pan-Arab constraints on sovereignty, Sadat’s promotion of sovereignty over Arabism released many remaining such constraints. In this way, the individual states were ‘deconstructing’ the Arab system. The consequent popular disillusionment precipitated a decline in mass Arabism in the eighties that further released constraints on pursuit of raison d’état. Parallel to this, the new Arab economic order faltered. Inter-Arab trade remained at less than 10 per cent of total Arab trade and no Arab investment market or pan-Arab bourgeoisie emerged since capitalpoor economies were too state-centric and oil attached the interests of the capital-surplus oil producers to the world economy and away from the Arab world. Most Arab capital surpluses were recycled to the West; those transferred to the non-oil Arab countries filled only a third of these




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countries’ needs Inter-Arab capital transfers declined after the oil bubble burst around 1986. By the 1990s, 98 per cent of private Arab foreign investment was outside the region. Arab migrant workers acquired no rights in other Arab states and had to leave their host countries when the oil-boom demand dropped. Meanwhile oil accentuated the income gap between oil and non-oil countries, sharply differentiating their interests.

Towards Westphalianisation (1980s–present) The collapse of the Arab Triangle rendered the Arab system ‘centre-less’, unleashing a multipolar struggle for power among several contending states. These states, increasingly consolidated at home through oil rent and arms, were better enabled to manage transstate ideological pressures, hence to prioritise reason of state over pan-Arab norms. The consequent fragmentation of the Arab world, however, made it more vulnerable to external threats on its peripheries: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Iran–Iraq War. These threats polarised the Arab world over whether to prioritise the Israeli or Iranian threat, and massively intensified insecurity which states sought to address through self-help, particularly rent-funded arms races that made each state more of a threat to its neighbour, constructing a classic security dilemma. States adopted one of two self-help strategies. Where wars and threat levels were the highest, in Syria and Iraq, national security states were created that achieved exceptional levels of military mobilisation. Syria’s Assad regime was consolidated amidst back-to-back Islamic rebellion and conflict with an Israeli–American combination in Lebanon. Iraq’s Ba’thist regime was consolidated in the crucible of war with Iran. As for the monarchies, oil-funded welfare states stabilised them, too, but, still unable to trust the middle class, they kept their armies small and recruited from extended royal families and loyal tribes; this required them, in consequence, to rely for their security on high-tech oil-forarms purchases from the West and an increasing US naval presence in the Gulf. As regional threats increased, more remote great powers were seen less as threats and more as sources of protection in the regional struggle – at the cost of Arabism and its increasingly disregarded norm against foreign bases and treaties (Sela, 1998: 217–46). An ‘international society’ emerged which prized security over identity. If in 1967 the radical Arab states, Egypt and Syria, had allowed themselves to be driven by supra-state ideologies to challenge the status quo in defiance of the balance of power (Israeli military superiority), the high




costs to state interests led to their ‘socialisation’ into the rules of realist power-balancing, the matching of means and ends. Two decades later, revolutionary Iran was similarly brought by the costs of war to adopt less ambitious and ideological foreign policies. Given the breakdown of normative constraints, order rested on the emerging institution of power-balancing. It was, however, undermined by material imbalances that provided occasions for war. These partly derived from great variations in state size and strength but were exaggerated by the rapid power advantages achieved by states that enjoyed exceptional oil revenues or foreign aid and hence access to massive arms deliveries from external powers – Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. The Iran–Iraq War was made possible by the apparent collapse of Iranian military power in the Islamic revolution and the rising oil-fuelled military power of Iraq. Also, however, ‘buck-passing’ frustrated the construction of stable alliances against threatening states; thus, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was made possible by Egypt’s defection from the Arab–Israeli power balance. In time, ambitious states overreached themselves, stimulated anti-hegemonic alliances and incurred high costs that restored the balance of power. Thus, the Syria–Iran alliance was born out of defence against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Iraqi invasion of Iran: Syrian military and diplomatic support for Iran helped check Iraq and was reciprocated by Iran’s mobilising of the Lebanese Shi‘is to shift the balance in Lebanon against Israel. But if this power-balancing was enough to preserve the system it was not enough to keep the peace. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, injecting military insecurity into inter-Arab politics where competition had hitherto largely remained at the politicalideological level, crowned this process of Westphalianisation. In the absence of thicker institutions, conscious efforts to make the balance of power work as a basis of regional order can be seen as a ‘thin’ form of international society. However, Westphalianisation had yet to issue in a nation-states system since the regimes of the Arab world were unable to construct separate state identities convincing enough to marginalise competing sub- and supra-state identities and legitimise their material consolidation. Indeed, the main beneficiary of the decline of Arabism was less the individual states than an alternative supra-state identity, political Islam, which filled the ideological vacuum as those who felt excluded by the negative material side of state-building – the corruption and inequality that oil money encouraged – turned to it as an ideology of protest. An Islamist surge was unleashed by Iran’s attempt to export its Islamic revolution.




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Political Islam came to constitute the main opposition in all the Arab regimes as it mobilised the mass public in the way pan-Arabism had once done the middle classes. Yet Islamic movements faced stronger states than those pan-Arab movements had faced and the Iranian Islamic revolution was contained by the combined material power of the West and Iraq. Islamic movements had to content themselves with Islamising aspects of individual states, but acquired little direct leverage over foreign policy, which remained in the hands of secular elites. To be sure, given the continued legitimacy deficits of the individual states, these elites had to dilute, conceal and justify departures from Arab-Islamic norms in the face of a public now aroused by Islamic or mixed Arab-Islamic movements (for example Hizbullah). But most either increased repression or became more dependent on Western patrons for protection. Certainly, no pan-Islamic ‘regime’ emerged at the interstate level as a functional surrogate for pan-Arabism. However, the continued incongruence between a more Westphalian interstate society and a still Arab-Islamic interhuman society meant the regional system lacked the legitimation Westphalian systems enjoy elsewhere (where there is greater nation-state overlap). This legitimacy deficit, when combined with power imbalances, created conditions in which Saddam Hussein expected he could seize Kuwait and win pan-Arab leadership. In fact, his invasion paralysed the Arab League, opening the door to the Iraq wars of 1990–91 and 2003 in which the US tried to establish hegemony over the region. Washington’s unprecedented military penetration of the region and a much-heightened dependency of pro-Western regimes on it for protection appeared to reverse the gains in regional autonomy won under Nasser, thus eroding the actual sovereignty needed to legitimise Westphalianisation. Its policy of building alliances with client states and excluding ‘pariahs’ both facilitated imperial divide and rule and enervated regional multilateral institutions (Sayigh, 1999). But far from fostering a Pax Americana displacing the 1980s realist rules of the game, the US became a partisan player in this game. And, the loss of regional autonomy stimulated the rise of a new transstate Arab public sphere that was sharply at odds with Western-dependent Arab regimes and the US attempt to impose its neoliberal order on the region. America’s coercive power contained this resistance even while its very presence deepened its societal roots and further enervated the legitimacy of regional international society.





At its very birth, the Middle East regional system faced a gap between the material realities of state fragmentation and economic dependence and the transstate Arab and Islamic identities that dominated interhuman society. This reality was reflected in the simultaneous embrace of partly contrary institutions of regional international society, Arabism (later joined by pan-Islam) and sovereignty. Successive attempts to reconcile them was the main factor driving regional international society, beginning with the establishment of the Arab League (later joined by the OIC). Ultimately the anarchy of the states system combined with the lack of economic interdependence in the region deprived both pan-Arabism and pan-Islam of a material infrastructure that could make identity the basis of effective and durable common action. At every successive stage, material conditions shaped the rise and the character of a given version of regional international society, whose normative disposition did then not only constrain individual states but also shaped the way they saw their interests. Yet, agency did matter, for when pivotal states combined material and normative power, their actions were decisive for the kind of order that emerged: without Nasser’s Egypt there would have been no pan-Arab order, without Saudi Arabia, no oil order, without Iraq, no war-centred order. Nasser’s pan-Arab leadership depended on Egypt’s material weight as well as the unique moral authority he acquired. His attempt to use transstate pan-Arab movements to buttress Egyptian hegemony over a pan-Arab regime depended on bipolarity and an imbalance between Egyptian state formation and that in the other Arab states. In this order, regimes tended to define their interests in terms of the identity and legitimacy needed to survive at home. But ultimately, the pan-Arab regime lacked sufficient material underpinning and was destroyed by Israel’s superior military power. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia was pivotal to the establishment of a concert of leading states underpinned by oil-funded economic interdependence that brought states to redefine their interests in terms of the pursuit of wealth and territorial recovery. This order was aborted by the success of the US in detaching the interests of the potential Arab hegemons, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, from the region and engineering the recycling of petrodollars out of the region. In the 1980s to early 1990s, wars – launched by Iraq and Israel – and militarisation propelled a creeping Westphalianisation of the states system in which order rested on an unstable balance of power and in which



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states defined their interests in terms of military security. Simultaneously, the US used three Gulf wars to deepen its intervention, which, however, stimulated an anti-imperialist reaction in interhuman society. Currently, the regional states system is embraced by a rather dysfunctional form of international society mixing power politics, especially on the Arab–non-Arab faultlines, with a much-thinned Arabism among the Arab states. The gap between interstate society and interhuman society is wider than ever, preventing the (neo-Gramscian) hegemony needed to stabilise a regional order.




10 Conclusions

Introduction We designed this book to use English school theory as a conceptual lens through which to look at the Middle East. All social theory can be understood as a type of lens through which to observe humankind. In this sense, social theories are analagous to physical lenses. Like eyes, infrared goggles and X-ray machines, they all view a single reality, but by using a particular wavelength select which parts of it become clearer, and which parts are obscured. As a lens, English school theory highlights social structures (shared norms, rules, institutions and identities) particularly among states, but also in the transnational and interhuman domains. As far as we know, there has been no systematic attempt to look at the Middle East in this way, so we hoped, at a minimum, to get a distinctive view of this complicated and important region. At the same time, we were aware of some shortcomings and defects in the English school lens. It has been used mainly to look at social structure at the global level, and has not been tuned to focus on the regional one. And although English school theory is in principle about social structures not just in the interstate domain, but also in the transnational and interhuman ones, in practice it is much better developed for looking at states systems than at the other domains. It has not been well developed for analysing social structure in either the transnational or the interhuman domain, nor for looking at how these relate to the interstate one. Knowing this, a second purpose of this book was to reverse the roles, and use the Middle East as a lens through which to examine the shortcomings and defects of English school theory. By using the Middle East as a test case, we hoped to be able both to improve the tuning of English school theory for looking at the regional level, and to 226



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sharpen up its focus to take in all three domains rather than just the interstate one. In the first section of this chapter we reflect on English school theory, and what using it on the Middle East has taught us about the strengths and weaknesses of the theory. In the second section we turn to the Middle East, and sum up what the theory has told us about the region, and what this kind of approach contributes to Middle East studies.

1 The English school seen through the Middle East lens As was discussed in Chapter 2, looking for international and world society at the regional level raises a number of basic questions. We start with two assumptions: first, that an interstate society exists at the global level more or less along the lines sketched in Chapter 2; and second, that in principle it is possible, and in practice probable, that distinctive regional societies exist embedded within the global one. If these assumptions are accepted, then the problem is how to differentiate social structures at the regional level from those at the global level. Exploring these issues for the Middle East and its relation to the global social structures, identified quite a number of areas in which English school theory was either inadequately developed or not developed at all. The things that the Middle East can tell us about English school theory can be grouped under three headings: the relationship at the regional level among the interstate, transnational and interhuman domains; institutions, both primary and secondary; and the relationship between the global and regional levels. The relationship among the interstate, transnational and interhuman domains The Middle East case suggests that the relationship among the three domains deserves more attention than it usually gets in English school discussions. There are features of the Middle East in relation to which two key English school questions cannot be answered without a much more extensive consideration of all three domains and their interrelationship. The standard English school practice of discussing interstate societies as if they were relatively autonomous (as supported by Halliday in Chapter 1), and using ‘world society’ largely to raise normative questions, is, we think, simply unsustainable. The transnational and interhuman domains are not just the repository of normative issues (though they are that too): they are also crucial to how regional international societies are defined, and to how their institutional structure is understood.



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The first question raised concerns the usual assumption in English school theory about the relationship between international and world society. This holds that an interstate society is much facilitated by the existence of an underlying shared culture from which its values and institutions can be drawn, with Europe, ancient Greece and Sino-centric Asia as the classical examples. But this understanding rests on the assumption of a somehow ‘natural’ process of evolved state formation in which the indigenous culture(s) and the process of state formation are free to play into each other. This assumption is much less salient for the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire began the process of transmitting Westphalian institutions into the region, which was completed by more direct Western interventions during the nineteenth century and especially after the First World War. In effect the interstate domain in the Middle East was, with a few exceptions, largely created by, and is still sustained by, outside powers. Under such ongoing post-imperial circumstances, one would expect to find powerful and pervasive remnants of the colonial structures in which the institutions in the interstate domain were strongly conditioned by the global level, while those in the transnational and interhuman domains would have local roots in society. The likely consequence of this would be a very significant disjuncture between the interstate domain on the one hand and the transnational and interhuman domains on the other. Such a disjuncture is still visible in the Middle East. The local states have succeeded to some extent in adapting themselves to the Arab nationalist and Islamic pressures coming from below, and even, up to a point, in establishing national identities and legitimising their boundaries. But their coercive authoritarianism and conspicuous dependency on outside powers remain key sources of disaffection and weak legitimacy. This disjuncture has huge consequences for the second question, which is how one approaches the demarcation of a regional international society. As noted above, defining the boundaries of a social structure is not problematic at the global level, which is where most of the English school’s thinking has been focused. But if the idea of society is to be meaningful at the regional level, there must be some features that enable the region to be distinguished from both other regional societies and the global one. The disjuncture between the domains in the Middle East means that while we can make a differentiation significant enough to identify a Middle Eastern international society distinct from the global level, we cannot identify a single coherent entity. What we find instead is a regional society structured in concentric circles which are defined partly, but not wholly, within different domains.



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(1) In the interstate domain, a rather basic, somewhat Westphalian, interstate society coterminous with the Middle Eastern regional security complex (RSC) in membership (that is the Arab states plus Iran, Israel, with Turkey and Afghanistan as insulators: see Buzan and Wæver, 2003: 185–218), and lying somewhere between power political and coexistence in the extent and nature of its primary institutions. (2) Within that, in the interstate and interhuman domains, an Arab society defined mainly by the fact that Arab identity is common to all. This gives nationalism some rather peculiar qualities in which it can both support and weaken the post-colonial states within the Arab world. Arab nationalism is an institution in both the interstate and interhuman domains, sometimes harmonising them and sometimes pushing them apart. In the interstate domain, again contra Halliday in Chapter 1, we think that Arab nationalism generates some solidarist characteristics, which weaken the institution of sovereignty/non-intervention. (3) In the interstate, transnational and interhuman domains, and somewhat wider than the Middle East defined by the RSC, an Islamic society. This is mainly weak in the interstate domain, where it is easily overridden by both sovereignty and other (often ethno-national) identities. But it is rather stronger, yet also internally divided, in the transnational and interhuman domains. The interstate society is mainly Westphalian, and lying somewhere between power political and coexistence in its shared values. The transnational and interhuman society is solidarist in some respects, but power political and coexistence in others. In some interpretations, the Islamic element, like the Arab one, can also pose solidarist questions to a strictly Westphalian interpretation of sovereignty and non-intervention. This structure of concentric circles is messy, and in part extends well beyond the Middle East into South and South-East Asia. Concentric circles is not, however, an unprecedented way to think about regions, as illustrated by some of the discussions of EU-Europe (Buzan et al., 1990: 206–10). The difference is that in the EU context, the concentric circles are hierarchically arranged around the core of the EU, whereas in the Middle East the circles are defined by different binding forces. Nevertheless, this model does suggest a reasonably coherent Middle



We will examine this in more detail below. For now it suffices just to identify the three main circles and their location in and across domains:

Eastern international society with an Arab core and a slightly wider Middle Eastern Islamic circle that, as suggested in Chapter 8, differentiates itself from South and South-East Asian Islam. Opposition to Israel helps to overcome divisions within the Arab and Islamic universes, and, as suggested in Chapter 7, to fuse Arab and Islamic identity. Summing up this complicated interplay among the three domains, we get a rather odd picture. On the one hand, pan-Islamic and panArab identities, plus a mainly unhappy colonial history and a highly penetrated present position combine to support anti-imperialism generally and anti-Westernism particularly as strong sentiments across all the domains in the region. The existence and mini-imperial policies of Israel play into, and inflame, these sentiments. On the other hand the literature paints a picture of a broadly successful penetration of the region by the West (and during the Cold War the Soviets), in which most ruling elites are to a significant degree dependent on either or both of external military and economic support. Anti-imperialism and anti-Westernism are therefore mainly embedded in the interhuman and transnational domains, tied in with Islamism and Arabism. State elites have to play to this sentiment, and may even believe it themselves, but they are caught uncomfortably between their material dependence on outside powers and the price they have to pay for this in lost legitimacy with their populations. Does the heavy military, economic and political penetration suggest that in the interstate domain, the Middle East is merely a dependent neocolonial periphery of global-level interstate society, after some brief resistance now largely going along with the Westphalian framing imposed on it by the West at decolonisation? If it does, then there is a major structural cleavage between the interstate domain on the one hand, and the transnational and interhuman ones on the other, with the former largely playing a Western-imposed game, and the latter being a site of intense resistance to external powers and their interstate society, Western (secular) culture generally and the local ruling elites in particular. If this is the case, then the situation would fit quite well into Galtung’s (1971) classic model of structural imperialism, and suggest an unstable social configuration of centre (= West)–periphery (= Middle East) plus centre-of-periphery (= Middle East elites)–periphery-of-periphery (= populations), largely held in place by coercion. Then the question would be: how stable the Middle East’s state structure itself is. Much is made in the literature about the relative success of state consolidation in the Middle East over the past few decades despite unpromising post-colonial boundaries and the tensions with pan-identities, and notwithstanding the failures of democracy and development (Barnett,




1998; Yapp, 1991: 35–46, 411–18, 432). Even oppositions have mostly come to accept the state structure as such, albeit remaining strong in both their insistence on Arab, and to a lesser extent Islamic, solidarity, and their rejection of the state’s role as transmission belt of outside values/pressures rather than a buffer against them. Arabism and Islamism both weaken the Westphalian institutions of sovereignty, non-intervention and territoriality, without necessarily contesting the state itself. Such revolutionism remains mainly on the Islamist extremes among those who have some other form of political order, such as a new caliphate, in mind. The importance of all three domains in defining the region points to the need to pay attention not just to the institutions of interstate society, as the English school mainly does, but also to the institutions of ‘world society’, in the transnational and interhuman domains, about which the English school has had rather little to say. Given the structure of social relations in the Middle East, institutions in the transnational and interhuman domains may not only support those in the interstate domain, as the standard English school line would suggest, but up to a point oppose them. The idea of institutional tensions not just within the interstate domain (Buzan, 2004: 250–1) but also across domains is, we think, new to English school theory, and offers a way of substantially raising the profile of what until now have been the Cinderella domains of English school theory.

Institutions In order to think about synergies and/or tensions across the three domains, one has to think about institutions. International and world societies are defined mainly by their primary institutions, and up to a point by their secondary ones, so it is to these institutions that one must turn in order to make the differentiation. If one accepts that social structures coexist at both the global and the regional levels, then it seems probable that many primary interstate institutions will be broadly shared across both levels. Whether the regional level, and the Middle East in particular, is distinctive or not, and whether it is strongly or only weakly differentiated from the global level, will depend on the following three variables: (1) What is the scope of primary institutions in the interstate domain? (2) How do we think about primary institutions in the transnational and interhuman domains? (3) How do we relate primary and secondary institutions?



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(1) The scope of primary institutions in the interstate domain was discussed in Chapter 5, and variations were observed along the lines of three criteria: Middle Eastern institutions not shared with the global level, global institutions not present in the Middle East and different interpretations in the Middle East of global institutions (see Chapter 5). Two major outcomes derived from such study: one, that the Middle East is a regional interstate society, and two, that there are substantial theoretical inquiries to add to the English school dialogue on the global level of international society. Most of the observations on the first point (the Middle East being a regional interstate society) in a general sense cause no difficulty for English school theory. They simply suggest a different mix and interpretation of primary institutions in the Middle East from that at the so-called global level, but nothing that seems out of line with practices of international society from other times and places (except Arab nationalism), or what is generally held to count as a primary institution of international interstate society. The second point, however, opens questions on how English school theory operates at the global level and how the neglect of the regional has profound consequences on the way the English school thinks about ‘international society’ generally. We have learned in this study that the global level in primary institutions builds on a basic understanding of each individual institution, while what the English school truly means when talking about ‘the global level’ is the institutional expectations of the Western core. A true global level would offer a wide range of understanding for each institution between the two possible extremes of practice (the quasi-states of Africa at one end or Britain at the other to mention a Western example). However, when the English school refers to the institutions of the ‘global level’ does not mean such a range of understanding but the specific expectations of the Western core. The other theoretical question arising from the institutional approach is about whether or not something like the Arab–Israeli conflict can or should be counted as a primary institution, as is done in Chapter 5. This poses a general problem for English school theory about whether and how to delimit those interstate social structures that we want to call primary institutions, from other social structures that may in many ways meet the definition. What, in other words, distinguishes primary institutions from other types of social structure? Recall that primary institutions are defined as: ‘relatively fundamental and durable practices that are evolved more than designed; and that they are constitutive of actors and their patterns of legitimate activity in relation to each other’. The existing English school literature offers mainly empirical guidance about primary




institutions, but has no specified limits about what is included and what excluded by the definition. Taking the Middle East as a case-study has shown us that the regional level is a useful starting point to address these conceptual inquiries in the English school. Chapter 5 has argued that at the sub-global level a particular conflict can be an institution in itself given the enormous constitutive impact that it brings to a specific area. The strength of the constitutive side, in combination with the other features of institutions, solves the conceptual challenges of what is included or not in the definition of institution in relation to the Israel–Palestine conflict: it brings in all the players in the region, both Arab and nonArab, it cuts across the different concentric circles in the Middle East and has huge implications for the regional interpretation of other global institutions, mainly war (which is a much less constrained institution in the Middle East than elsewhere) and great power management (which is widely read as imperialism, and plays into the cleavage between the interstate and interhuman levels discussed above). If this constitutive impact of a specific conflict is an exclusive feature of the regional level or if it can be transferred to the way we look at the global level is a question that we would like to throw into the mainstream theoretical debate. One might for example easily consider war to be a primary institution and that fits with the traditional disposition of the English school to think of primary institutions in terms of generalised principles or practices: diplomacy, international law, balance of power, sovereignty, territoriality and suchlike. But can, or should, we think of particular long wars as primary institutions in their own right, or indeed particular nationalisms (Arab) or religions (Christianity)? What do we do with Islam having decided that it is not strong enough in the interstate domain to count as a primary institution? If the Arab/Islamic–Israel conflict is an institution of Middle Eastern society, then one would have to think seriously about whether the Cold War should have been counted as an institution of global international society. Both are certainly evolved and durable social structures that have constitutive effects on the states bound up in them. If we accept Arab nationalism as an institution for the contemporary Middle East, should Christianity not have the same standing in considerations of European international society, often referred to as ‘Christendom’, from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries? Should these more specific structures be thought of as primary institutions of international society in whatever domain, or as some lesser form of social structure? Existing theory does not offer clear guidance on how to resolve this question. It is clear that social structures exist across a spectrum, and that primary institutions are located at the deeper, more durable end of



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that spectrum. It is also clear how to distinguish primary from secondary institutions. But it is not clear how or whether to devise more explicit criteria for inclusion in and exclusion from the category of primary institution, and the English school needs to think more about this. (2) The next question is: how do we think about primary institutions in the transnational and interhuman domains? In addition to its ambiguity about the scope of primary institutions, English school theory offers little specific guidance about what counts as primary institutions in the transnational and interhuman domains, and neither has there been much empirical discussion of this. The older ‘revolutionist’ understanding of world society embraced ideologies such as communism, universal empire and cosmopolitanism that were opposed to the states system, and wanted to replace interstate society with some other organising principle. This understanding plays to Halliday’s concern in Chapter 1, and Hinnebusch’s in Chapter 9, to bring social movements into English school thinking, a point reinforced by the importance attached throughout this book to the interhuman and transnational domains. Although it has not been done in practice, nothing obviously stands in the way of working out what the primary institutions of such alternative organising principles might look like. The interhuman domain is by definition about patterns of shared identity, and the principles that define such groups. It is obvious that there is an enormous variety of both patterns and principles that structure human identity, and that the empirical results of these are both numerous beyond counting, and varied in scale from the very local to the almost global. Much of this may structure itself within states as civil (or uncivil) society, and the very idea of the nation-state is of course intended to bring the power of ethno-national identity into line with the structure of interstate society. But much in the interhuman domain is independent of the state (in the sense of not being dependent on the state for its existence, legitimation or reproduction), most obviously world religions and the identities that go along with the idea of belonging to a given civilisation. An identity of humankind is the largest possible on a global scale (unless one identifies with all life) and since the mid-twentieth century this might be said to exist very weakly on a global scale. Whether it is more accurately located in the interhuman, transnational or interstate domain is an interesting question given that human rights is mainly pushed by (some) states and non-state actors. The Middle East offers a wealth of interesting material in the interhuman domain. On the one hand, it is permeated and fragmented by many smaller-scale identities of tribe, clan, sect and suchlike that often transcend state boundaries. On the other, it features two impressive




macro-identities, Arab and Islamic, that can be seen as primary institutions in its interhuman domain. To some extent these seem similar to the revolutionist positions placed by the classical English school in world society, albeit with a particularist regional flavour. In this sense, the Middle East is an interesting contrast to Europe. Europe has exceptionally impressive secondary institutions in the interstate domain, but laments its lack of ‘European’ identity in the interhuman domain, which remains fragmented along national lines (Smith, 1992; Lynch, 2006b: 22). The Middle East has, with a few exceptions, relatively weak nationstate identities, and only partial and fairly feeble secondary institutions in the interstate domain. But it has two powerful macro ones in the interhuman domain. And except for some non-Islamic Arab minorities, these two institutions do not work against each other, but are mainly complementary, as shown in Chapter 7. As we have seen, Arabism and Islam can work powerfully both with and against the states in the Middle East. They are rooted in the interhuman domain but operate also in the interstate one. Together they reinforce powerful anti-imperial, anti-Western and anti-Israel sentiments that pose such a conundrum both for the West, and for the leaders of the dependent post-colonial states of the region. The question of primary institutions in the transnational domain is less clear than for the interhuman one. Certainly there are many transnational organisations within Islam, probably much less so in relation to Arabism, where more of the action and organisation is located in the interhuman and interstate domains. But given that such non-state actors (NSAs) operate within the frame of interstate society (even if sometimes against it), it is not clear that there is any sort of ‘society’ in this domain in the sense of these NSAs constructing rules, norms and institutions among themselves. If there are any primary institutions in this domain they would again be Islam and Arabism, which therefore have standing across the three domains. Trying to sum this up, and keeping in mind that what we mean by institutions in these two domains emphasises the same constitutive logic as for the interstate domain, we conclude as follows. The work in this book suggests the existence of three types of institutions on these two domains: (I) Institutions that both appear in the interstate domain and operate in the other two domains. These would include: a. Arab nationalism. b. Territoriality (at the interhuman level two stateless nations, Kurds and Palestinians, play to territorial claims and aspirations).



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c. Diplomacy (the role that non-state actors such as Kurds, Palestinians or Islamists play in Middle Eastern diplomacy). d. War (In particular the GWoT, which moves the institution of war from being purely among states to between the interstate and the transnational domains). (II) New institutions that appear in these two non-state domains as a reaction against an institution in the interstate domain: a. Anti-imperialism (as a reaction against great power management and Western intrusion across the region). (III) Institutions purely of the non-state domains: a. Islam. (3) How does one link the secondary institutions to primary ones? Again, this is a question on which the existing literature does not provide much theoretical guidance, but our case-study offers the opportunity to take a closer look at a specific body of empirical evidence. Buzan (2004, 187) has suggested that one can, up to a point, associate secondary institutions with primary ones. Most of the discussion about Middle Eastern secondary institutions in the literature, including this book, is pretty contemptuous, especially about the Arab League and OIC, but also GCC and other more local intergovernmental organisations (IGOs). The general tendency is to dismiss these IGOs as feeble talking shops, governed by lowest common denominators set so low as to make meaningful collective action impossible: what in Chapter 6 is labelled ‘dead-letter’ international societies. Yet at the same time, these IGOs are offered as indicators of the presence, or strength, of some primary institutions, because they embed not only general Westphalian principles such as sovereignty, non-intervention, diplomacy and international law, but also specifically regional primary institutions such as Arab nationalism and Islam. It is clear that secondary institutions will often relate to more than one primary institution, and can seldom be seen as the expression of just one. What is less clear is how or whether the condition of secondary interstate institutions benchmarks that of primary ones. Do feeble/robust secondary institutions necessarily mean that the primary institutions they express are also feeble/robust? Or does it more reflect the consequence of trying to embody contradictory institutions, most obviously sovereignty and supra-state ideologies? The generally feeble interstate secondary institutions of the Middle East do tend to correlate with what we have observed about how certain primary institutions are weak, most obviously sovereignty and non-intervention, but also Islam and Arab nationalism. This is, however, mainly true in the interstate




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The relationship between the global and regional levels Since the English school has hardly at all addressed the issue of international and world society at the regional level, it is not surprising that it has little to say about the relationship between the global and regional levels. The classical focus of the English school has been on its story about the expansion of international society from Europe to the rest of the world. In this story the main theme is the creation of a global-scale, universal interstate society, with Europe as the vanguard setting the template to which the rest of the world had to adapt. This is partly a story about a few unconquered countries (Ottoman Empire, China, Japan) coming to terms with a Western-dominated world order, and mainly a story of the process of colonisation–decolonisation being used to reconstruct (often badly) the domestic and international politics of the non-Western world along European (Westphalian) lines. Its focus is therefore on the tension between expansion and homogenisation at the global level, and coercion and consent at the regional one. It does contain worries about the dilution and weakening of global interstate society because of the inflow of weak states and non-Western cultures, and sometimes it worries about the impact of expansion on indigenous peoples (Keal, 2003). But it seldom asks questions about sub-global international society or regional differentiation from the global level. This question is therefore terra incognita for the English school, and what is perhaps surprising is how big, complicated and important a question it turns out to be when confronted in terms of a case-study like the Middle East. Yet because it is a place where the imposition of the Wesphalian model was, with a few exceptions, badly done, the Middle East might be thought of as a rather poor choice for the pilot exploration of regional international society. It is not as bad a choice as sub-Saharan Africa would have been, where much of the imposed state structure has failed, but it is not as good a choice as Asia or Latin America might have been, where the transplant of European-style politics has been fairly successful. Because the imposition of Westphalian politics onto the Middle East was in many respects flawed and dysfunctional in relation to the local societies, it created a rather unstable, coercion-heavy type of state and regional interstate politics. This flawed structure then had to endure the disruptive presence of Israel, the corrupting influence of oil,



domain, and does not reflect the strength of secondary institutions in the interhuman and transnational domains, where several chapters have stressed the importance of social movements in conducting the main opposition to the state and international society (regional and global).

the outside interests in the Suez Canal and the region’s location on the containment boundary of the Cold War, all of which brought powerful and sustained external engagements into the region. None of this points towards a model region that is independently and consensually part of global international society while at the same time expressing elements of its own cultural distinctiveness in a regional international society. What the previous chapters have unfolded is a story which, on the face of it, points towards the conclusion that for over two centuries the Middle Eastern states system has been so thoroughly dominated, penetrated and manipulated by the West that it would be something of a miracle to find any regional differentiation at all other than that arising from rebellions against the illegitimacy of the intrusion (Brown, 1984). The Ottoman Empire did influence aspects of the transition to the modern Middle East. But the Empire was itself a transmission belt for some Western institutions into the region, and after the First World War, European powers basically imposed the current set of states onto the carcass of the Ottoman Empire. For both the Arab world and Israel, the process of colonisation and decolonisation was a series of deals between Western powers and local elites. Decolonisation gave these elites some autonomy. But it did so not just at the price of their accepting the Westphalian rules of the game, but also with the imposition that the game had to be played on a board defined by mainly unnatural states with shallow historical roots. With a few exceptions, the new states represented a poor fit between territory and government on the one hand, and patterns of identity among their peoples on the other. One consequence of all this, whether intentional or not, was to keep the local elites dependent on outside powers for the economic and/or military resources necessary for them to stay in power. And for the reasons just given (oil, Cold War, Suez, Israel), outside powers have been willing to provide those resources. Mostly they have come from Western powers, though during the Cold War the Soviet Union did provide some choices about financial and military support, and therefore more room for manoeuvre. In circumstances like this, it does not seem an overstatement to say that the states system in the Middle East was not only largely created by the West, but since then has also been substantially held in place by it. Not only have local elites been sustained by outside support, but also the global norm against allowing boundary changes by force (with the notable exception of Israel) has frozen the peculiar and awkward post-colonial structure of states in place. This arrangement is hardly normal in terms of the usual assumptions of English school theory about the relationship of states both to each other and to their peoples.




In the interstate domain it suggests the operation of a coercive vanguard model not just as a one-off event of colonisation/decolonisation that is now becoming old history, but as an ongoing affair in which the current US–British occupation of Iraq, and extensive US military, political and economic engagements in the region, are just the latest phase. This sustained and coercive vanguardism has created and sustained a regional system of states that has a centre–periphery structure both domestically, and in relation to external powers. Because the region lacks a dominant power within itself, what it does not have is a centre–periphery structure at the regional level. Thus, especially among the Arab states, many of the regimes in the Middle East, and up to a point the states themselves, have low legitimacy with their populations. Although most of them have achieved some degree of consolidation and legitimacy their regimes are caught in a tricky balancing act between their external dependence, and the intrusiveness of external great powers on the one hand, and the anti-imperial, Islamic and Arab nationalist pressures rising from below. Holding this balance all too frequently requires the Middle Eastern states to employ coercive measures against substantial parts of their populations. All of this suggests that in relation to the global level, the least autonomy in the Middle East will be in the interstate domain, and the most autonomy (and resistance) will be found in the transnational and interhuman domains, albeit with some elements of this resistance breaking though to state behaviour. In thinking about how to differentiate the Middle East from the global social structures, one might therefore need to look as much, or perhaps more closely, at the transnational and interhuman domains, and their interaction with the (inter)state domain, than at the interstate domain itself. From this perspective, the Middle East as a regional social structure is very different from Europe. In Europe, it is the relatively high degree of convergence among a group of strong states that differentiates the EU from global interstate society. The citizenry tend to resist this convergence by rallying to national identity. In the Middle East it is the weak state structures and governments themselves that face the problem of low legitimacy, and the tensions between the state level and the transnational and interhuman domains that define the region’s distinctiveness from the global level. In terms of English school theory more generally, the Middle East case suggests that the nature of relations between the global and regional social structures is a topic of considerable importance. There is no explicit discussion or theorisation of this as yet, but the obvious jumping-off point is the small literature on colonialism as an institution of European



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interstate society. Holsti (2004) offers colonialism as an example of an institution that has declined into obsolescence. Keene (2002) and in a different way Keal (2003) argue that the ramifications of colonialism are ongoing in the form of divided sovereignty and the operation of a ‘standard of civilisation’ in ways that the classical English school formulation of international society works to obscure. The Middle Eastern case suggests that these arguments deserve more attention than they have received. From this perspective, the Middle East case-study raises interesting questions about the whole concept of ‘global-level interstate society’, which implies a fairly homogeneous construction based on sovereign equality among the members. Perhaps that concept understates the postcoloniality of what actually exists, which looks more like a Western core surrounded by a set of regional variations which overlap with the core at some points and not at others. This points to the work of Watson (1990; 1992: 299–309, 319–25; 1997; see also Clark, 1989; 2005: 227–43, 254) who highlights the tension in post-1945 international society because the principle of legitimacy lies with sovereign equality and nationalism, but much of the practice is hegemonic, and there is no acceptable principle to legitimise hegemony. The existence of a core/regions structure means that global-level interstate society is only egalitarian in principle, while remaining stratified in much of its practice. The impact of its vanguard mode of construction was not eliminated by decolonisation and remains strong and ongoing. Both the differentiation between core and regions, and the variations among the regions themselves, mean that there is considerably less global homogeneity than implied by ‘globallevel interstate society’. There is a thicker and more solidarist Western core and a thinner, varied periphery sharing elements of sovereignty, diplomacy, international law and nationalism, but often having different interpretations and practices associated with them from those in the Western core. This conclusion highlights the potentially misleading quality of ‘global’ in the English school discourse and raises the need to be more aware of the distinction between the Western core of international society and its global projection, and what is actually happening in the periphery. Our argument elsewhere (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005) about the relevance of the loose term ‘international community’ perhaps suggests one way of beginning to deal in a more differentiated and nuanced fashion with the ‘global’ in international society. Finally, since the motive for this project was to open up the idea of regional-level international society, we need to take a position on whether or not the Middle East is a regional international society.




We decided so far that it is a regional interstate society based on institutional distinctiveness, but the state level is only one of the three domains in the interpretation of international society that we have adopted in this book. From what has been said so far, it seems clear that the answer has to be yes. It would be, of course, possible to quibble endlessly over the degree and type of difference necessary for a regional international society to be differentiated from the global one. In principle also one should look at the differentiation between any particular regional international society and its neighbours, a task beyond the resources of this project. What we have observed in the Middle East using our English school lens seems clearly sufficient to sustain a case for a differentiation that is both significant and durable. The nature of the state in the Middle East, and the relationship of states there to both their interhuman domain and the global core, are all distinctive in ways that generate the differences in primary institutions noted above. The factors that make the Middle East distinctive are deeply rooted, and though of course they could change over time, such change looks unlikely to be rapid or soon. The presence of Israel powerfully conditions both the Middle East itself, and its relations with the West, in ways that work to sustain the existing social structure. The intractability of the Arab–Israeli conflict does not suggest that this problem will be easily or quickly resolved. It seems a safe bet that it will continue to poison the region for decades. Should change nevertheless occur, it could easily go in either direction: to increase or to narrow the differentiation between the Middle East and global international society. Increasing Islamic revolutionism within the Middle East, or a wider acceptance of democracy and human rights at the global level, could increase the gap. Democratisation in the Middle East might reduce the gap, but it could also widen it if such democracy strengthened militant Arabism and/or Islamism within Middle Eastern politics. The Middle Eastern states are bound together in a regional security complex which gives them stronger interactions with each other than with states outside the region. This raises another question needing more research which is whether one could theorise a connection between strong security interdependence on the one hand, and the emergence of distinctive regional international societies on the other. On the face of it, it looks a reasonable hypothesis. It fits with European history, the Middle East case lends further credence to it and others might as well, which opens the possibility of bridge-building between international security theory (Copenhagen school) and English school theory. Once the distinction between global and regional international societies has been established analytically and empirically, as we have done



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above, this opens up a new research area within the English school for normative and policy analysis about how these two levels of international society can and should relate to each other. As Buzan (2004: 16–18, 207–14, 270) argued, the existence of more than one international society does not necessarily or even probably mean conflict over which dominates international society at the global level. It is possible for regional international societies to exist in harmony with a global one, or at least not be threatening to it. Because of the influence of the Cold War, classical English school writers feared conflict over who would dominate the global level, and so they ignored the regional level. The Middle East case suggests something midway along the spectrum from harmony to conflict in relations between the regional and global levels. In the interstate domain the Middle East interstate society is so divided, dependent, parochial, penetrated and compromised as anyway to be incapable of such a competition either with the West or with other centres of power such as East Asia. But in the interhuman and transnational domains there is certainly a strong site of resistance to Western values, most of which is defensive, in the sense of wanting to preserve the local culture against the imperialism of Western values. Only at the extremes is there anything parallel to the Cold War in which local values are projected as an alternative for the global level. Unlike during the Cold War, when the threat of communism was taken seriously in the West as a rival basis for international society, there is not much concern that Islam poses that kind of threat. To the extent that there is such concern it is less about imposition from outside than about migration producing cultural change from within. An external threat is only propagated by the advocates of radical interpretations of Islam; it brings a disturbing amount of chaos power, but has so failed to come to terms with modernity that it is not a plausible alternative organising principle for the political economy of humankind.

2 The Middle East seen through the English school lens We opened this book with Halliday’s thought-provoking introduction to the English school in general and his take on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach in the wider context of International Relations theory. Halliday credited the English school with being able to navigate among the excesses of realism, liberalism and Marxism while retaining a historical perspective. And he warned against its anodyne rendering of the history of the expansion of European international society, and the underplaying of the damage this did to those on the receiving end.




One assumption of this project was that the lens of English school theory would allow us to look at the Middle East in a way that no other theory of International Relations does. Now we have established that the Middle East is a distinctive regional international society, but so what? This conclusion raises lots of interesting issues and questions for those interested in English school theory, but what does it reveal to those whose main interest is in the Middle East itself? What we promised was the first social structural analysis of the Middle East in international society terms. In practice, this meant the following: • Making explicit that we would look at both the global and regional

levels, and in particular at their interplay. • Looking simultaneously at the three domains of society – interstate,

transnational and interhuman – and at their interplay with each other. • Focusing on primary and secondary institutions as the principal

expressions of social structure. • Bundling all of these together in order to get a long historical per-

spective and a sense of how these structures and relationships have evolved over time. We hope we have given a distinctive view both of what ‘the Middle East’ is, or can be understood to be, and how and why it relates to the global level, and the global level to it, as they do. Using these analytical tools, we think this book has contributed to the existing literature on the Middle East in the following ways: Analytical perspective Middle Eastern studies, like many other area studies, tends naturally towards an exceptionalist view of its subject. Such a perspective easily leads to atheoretical or even anti-theoretical attitudes, which in turn generates detachment from the general debates in the social sciences, and a self-construction as a kind of intellectual ghetto based on specialist knowledge of language, culture and history. We think we have shown with this book that whatever its exceptionalism the Middle East is perfectly amenable to analysis using the generalised intellectual tools of the English school. Using these tools the Middle East can be brought back into International Relations without losing its distinctiveness. Historical perspective We started our journey with the Ottoman Empire (Chapters 3 and 4) and followed its legacy through colonisation and post-colonisation to



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the present day. This historical perspective has allowed us to understand better how the social structure of the Middle East evolved, highlighting the underestimated influence of the Ottoman Empire in the making of the current Middle East. Chapter 4 adopted an innovative route into the historical trajectory of key interstate institutions (balance of power, diplomacy and international law) and showed how Ottomans and Europeans worked closely together in developing their modern understanding. The Ottomans acted subsequently as a transmission belt of those institutions across the Middle East. This collaboration in institutional development placed the Middle East in the global social structures before Western colonisation. Although sovereignty and territoriality are the great absents in those co-created institutions, Chapter 3 has shown how the traditional argument that places all the weight on post-colonisation ignores the fact that the Ottoman Middle East was already partly configured along the lines of a state system with autonomous provinces and independent Muslim territories. We have contributed to the general historical overview of the Middle East by applying the three domains approach: interstate, interhuman and transnational. This has cast light on how the current revival movements use a distorted account of the Ottoman times to justify their extremism when the Ottoman Empire encouraged Islamic identity not at the state level but at the interhuman, which is the position currently kept by the secular nature of the majority of states in the region. The tripartite angle of analysis has also revealed how the encounter of the Ottoman Empire with Europe consolidated innumerable local identities into politically usable Arab nationalism and Islamism, pointing to the existence of a greater depth in the current regional disjuncture between the state and non-state domains. Defining ‘the Middle East’ In terms of state boundaries, the definition of the Middle East set out in the first section of this chapter broadly agrees with many other writers on the region, and in that sense is fairly conventional. What is perhaps a bit more distinctive about it is the concentric circles structure, also outlined above, and the way this is based not just in the interstate domain, but also in the transnational and interhuman ones. Operating at the regional level has forced us to be more explicit about the three domains, and it turns out that the social structure of this region can only be fully appreciated if one extends the analysis beyond the interstate domain. Here we disagree with Halliday’s argument in Chapter 1.




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The picture we see through the English school lens both agrees and disagrees with points made by Halliday in Chapter 1. It agrees with him in highlighting the coercive imposition of a Westphalian state framing onto the Middle East during the process of colonisation/decolonisation, the ongoing effects of that disjuncture on the region’s history and the importance of social movements. But it partly disagrees with him in seeing the Middle East as mainly similar to other third world regions and not possessing a distinctive political culture. Our picture is similar to Halliday’s in that we see a highly penetrated region where interhuman and transnational norms are in constant tension with the core–periphery structures put in place by outsiders. But this general truth contains a wealth of difference that distinguishes different regions from each other (see also Buzan and Wæver, 2003). The Middle East provides us with a case that is quite contrary to a view that is easily inferred from the top-down, global-level, English school story of international society. In that story, decolonisation equates with sovereign equality, and one can look at global interstate society as a relatively homogeneous construction made up of independent units differentiated mainly by power. Our observation about how ‘the global’ tends to be confused with ‘the West’ and how institutionally there is not such a thing as the global international society beyond an elementary level, is significant for Middle Eastern studies. It provides an anchor for understanding further what gives the Middle East its distinctiveness on the state and non-state domains and where the structural challenges lie. The Middle Eastern case tells a story in which there is a clear centre–periphery structure carrying on after decolonisation and involving high levels of intrusion by the centre into the periphery. The states there are not ‘normal’ in the sense of being as independent as those at the centre, and this difference conditions not just their relations with each other and with the global level of interstate society, but also with their own peoples. This perspective is by no mean entirely new to Middle East studies, but it does perhaps help to tie all the elements together into a big picture and make its historical dynamics clearer. The highly penetrated nature of the Middle East at the state level also perhaps lends credence to arguments like that of Lustick (1997) about why there is no great power in the Middle East. The social structure of the Middle East By looking at all three domains, we get a different view of Islam and Arabism from that part of the Middle East literature that sees them as largely failed because their pan-versions have not displaced the



The Middle East in the global structure

post-colonial state structure (Ajami, 1978; Dawisha, 2003). It is true that the Arab post-colonial states in the Middle East have not only held their ground against the potentially revolutionist alternatives of panArabism and pan-Islam, but up to a point co-opted them to their own ends. This does not, however, mean that these states are therefore strong states in the sense of having high levels of consensual socio-political cohesion. Neither does it mean that because pan-Arabism and pan-Islam have failed to override the states system, they should be seen as failed or marginalised. As we have seen, they are very much alive in the transnational and interhuman domains where they pose a severe and ongoing problem for states caught between economic/military dependency on the West, and the legitimacy deficit (of both states and leaderships) visà-vis the people. Among other things, this structure creates powerful opportunities for both ambitious, charismatic state leaders and NSAs to play to the wider interhuman legitimacy structures. So from this multi-domain perspective, pan-Islam and Arab nationalism look more robust because they are well rooted in the transnational and interhuman domains, and not without significant effects even in the interstate domain despite their failure to displace it. The criteria of judgement applied to their success or failure have been too harsh (that they did not, revolutionist style, displace the post-colonial state system), and acceptance of the triumph of the consolidation of the post-colonial states system (that the states have survived despite their unpromising start and feebleness, and lack of democracy) has been too strong. Arab nationalism looks to be the stronger force in defining a distinctively Middle Eastern international society. The Middle East is only one part of a larger, looser, pan-Islamic society that operates in both the interstate and world society domains. By itself, Islam does not define the Middle East, though it does delineate some of the social structures within it. Increasingly it also seems to play a role in conjunction with Arab nationalism. Primary institutions The discussion of primary institutions is distinctive to the English school, and we have set out which such institutions were unique to the Middle East and which of those it shared with global international society but within which retained its own particular interpretations and practices. Some aspects of this discussion reflect insights already at least partly available within the literature on the Middle East. But it makes a difference to see them framed as primary institutions, grouped together as such, showing their constitutive impact on the region, and compared and contrasted with such institutions at the global level. We hope




we have added something to the historical understanding of where these institutions came from and how they evolved. We also hope that placing these institutions within and across the three domains adds to understanding about how and why they work the way they do. Arab nationalism, for example, develops from the rise of nationalist ideas in nineteenth-century Europe and the need within the Middle East to find new ways of mobilising against the ever-greater intrusions of European power into the declining body of the Ottoman Empire. It plays into both the interstate and interhuman domains, but does so in ways that make its impact on the region’s politics quite different from the impact of nationalism on European politics. Policy prescriptions about the relationship between the Middle East and global international society It remains to ask whether using an English school lens to look at the Middle East offers any useful insights into how to deal with the enormous policy problems that exist both within the region and between it and global international society. Given the mounting disaster of these relations, and the many grounds for pessimism, this is a big ask for any theory. The easiest conclusion to draw is the horrendous difficulty of doing anything right. Given not just where things are now, and how they got there, but also, as Halliday notes, the strength and pervasiveness of conspiracy theories about these things both within and outside the region, the situation is desperately unpromising. The perspective through the three domains and the global/regional levels exposes with brutal clarity just why the situation is so intractable. The basic structure, as set out above, is of a regional interstate society not just caught between, but also immobilised by, its relationship with the global core on the one hand, and the regional transnational and interhuman domains on the other. Its relationship with the core is legitimate, but unequal and penetrated. Its relationship with its own people suffers from weak legitimacy and excessive coercion. This would be bad enough by itself, but the addition of the Arab–Israeli conflict amplifies all the negatives in every direction. Is it possible to break into this set of deeply and tightly interlocked negatives in any meaningful way? The signs do not look good, not least for the reasons given in Chapter 2 about the (il)legitimacy of intervention across societal lines. Western support of both Israel and the regional state structure (and opposition to regimes that better reflect public opinion) reinforces the paralysis between the Middle Eastern interstate and interhuman societies. Democracy might break that paralysis, but in sweeping



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away the old regimes would unleash forces that might well make a bad situation even worse. The anti-imperial and anti-Western sentiments now bottled up by the post-colonial state would be released, almost certainly generating outcomes viewed as ugly and/or threatening by the West. Western reactions to the Iranian revolution, the election victories of FIS in Algeria and Hamas in Palestine are exemplars of this pattern. The West’s record suggests that it prefers ‘safe’ dictatorships to radical elected or popular regimes in the Middle East. Within the region, as demonstrated by the civil war in Iraq, democracy could release more parochial and sectarian sentiments capable of tearing apart existing structures and legitimating extensive resort to violence. One irony here is that both the West’s opposition to some modernising pan-Arabist secular regimes (Nasser, Assad, Saddam Hussein) and its support for other secular regimes (Shah of Iran, Algeria) have paved the way for the rise of political Islam. Western promotions of democracy and human rights are therefore likely just to reinforce its well-deserved reputation for hypocrisy when they are not acted on, and increase the instability and threateningness of the Middle East to Western interests if they are. It would perhaps help if the West had fewer reasons to be so deeply engaged in the Middle East and could pull back, though the possibilities here are very mixed and very complex. The ending of the Cold War removed one reason (containment) for Western intrusions into the Middle East, but this had what has turned out to be the unhappy effect of drawing the US deeper in. The key interests now are oil, the ‘global war on terrorism’ (GWoT) and Israel. Cheap oil has been so vital to the West in general and US hegemony in particular that until recently it has been hard to see any escape. But with rising concerns about carbon footprints and global warming, and the high price of oil making other energy technologies more appealing, it is becoming possible to imagine that this interest might diminish considerably in the coming decades. Oil will remain a valuable resource, but to the extent that the world economy can be weaned off it as the main source of energy, the strategic significance of the Middle East for the West will be lowered. If the world fails to wean itself off oil, then international engagement in the Middle East will increase. At current production rates, non-Middle East reserves of oil exports are expected to decrease dramatically, so that in about 15 years, the Middle East, with 66 per cent of the world reserves, will become the only major player in the international oil market (IAGS, 2003: 1). The GWoT is harder to predict, with the huge cost and adverse consequences of the intervention in Iraq pointing to a lower engagement by the US, but the deeper embedding of a conflict with both Iran and




extremist Islam pushing in the opposite direction. The counterproductive US–British invasion of Iraq seems fated not only to have empowered Iran, but also to have intensified the problem of Islamic extremism for the long run. There are almost no signs that the powerful grip of the Israel lobby on US politics is going to change, so the only hope on that front is that the US might turn its commitment to Israel into one to settle the Arab–Israeli conflict. If successful, this would no doubt help a lot, though it would be only the beginning rather than the end of resolving the problems both within the Middle East, and between it and the West. The US could expect little help from either side in pursuing such a goal, so ironically progress on this issue is likely to require more Western intrusion, not less. If there is any possibility for disengagement between the West and the Middle East, it is not going to come quickly or easily. An element to take into consideration here is the quiet rise of China as a major power in the Middle East. So far China has adopted a non-hostile policy towards the United States while applying a sharp strategy of heavy investment, economic interdependency and no concerns with uncomfortable matters such as democracy or human rights records. Alarm bells go off for the US side of the international equation when looking at the heavy infiltration policy that China is implementing in the Middle East. China is already Iran’s number one importer of oil, and Sino-Saudi Arabian relations have intensified in the past few years. So far Saudi Arabia has not accepted major Chinese offers on arms trade for the sake of preserving its friendship with the United States. Nothing assures that things will carry on that way. With 58 per cent of China’s oil imports coming from the Middle East and its annual energy needs expanding at a rate of 1 million barrels per day, China will ensure that its energy supply from the Middle East is safe and guaranteed (estimated to become 70 per cent of its total consumption by 2015). By the same token, the Middle East region has in China’s growing economy the chance of spreading its key international relationships diluting the exclusively US-led support of the past decades (EB, 2006: 1). The relationship between the Middle East and global international society is not the one feared by the classical English school of rivals for global dominance. The Middle East has neither the power nor the global ideological appeal to mount such a challenge. In the longer term, the issue is about what sort of regional international society will evolve in the Middle East that is able to bring its states and societies into a more consensual and less coerced relationship than they have been since decolonisation. A subsidiary issue is whether that process will once again change the shape of the Middle East, most obviously in relation to Turkey



Conclusions 249

and the Mahgreb. That is partly a question for the peoples of the Middle East themselves. But it is also a question specifically for the West, which has major, though far from sole, responsibility for the current unstable and undesirable state of affairs in the Middle East. Letting the Middle East follow its own course might well result in a weakening of global international society in the sense of a Middle Eastern regional international society that was more differentiated from the global/Western one than is now the case, and possibly more hostile to it. The problem to be solved is therefore partly about what the Middle Eastern regional international society should look like, and partly how far the West is able to go in letting the Middle East find its own social structure. Using a regional perspective on international society to rethink the legitimacy of intervention, along the lines suggested in Chapter 2, might be one place to start trying to recast the troubled relationship between the West and the Middle East.




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Aksan, Virginia, 62 Alexandria, 86, 121, 153 Algeria, 7, 9, 16, 22, 60, 61, 62, 68, 83, 121, 127, 129, 130, 132, 248 Algiers, 54, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 82 Ali Pasha, 78 alliances, 15, 38, 40–1, 78, 93, 103, 115, 145–6 Aman system, 74 ahdname, see Capitulations America, see US Central, 16 North, 10, 17, 29, 191 Americas, 1 amir, 48, 177, 178 amir al-mu’minin, 58 Amman, 131, 155, Amnesty International, 5, 26 Anatolia, 53, 59, 60, 62, 67 Anderson, Lisa, 85 Anderson, Matthew S., 74 Ansari, Hamid, 191 Aq Qoyunlu Turcomen, 58 Arab, 1, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 32, 36, 50, 56, 58, 81, 83, 84, 86, 99, 103, 111, 119, 120, 124, 125, 128, 129, 132–3, 171, 178–80, 183–5, 187–9, 197–8, 204, 206, 208, 215–16, 219–22, 229, 230, 238 Arabia, 7, 45, 53, 54, 55, 59, 62, 67, 68, 83, 107, 149, 178, 180, 185 Arabic, 52, 65, 80–1, 106, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 157, 163, 165, 179, 188 Arabism, 31, 69, 103, 105, 142–4, 163, 205, 209–12, 214–25, 230, 231, 235, 241, 245; see also Arab: nationalism; pan-Arabism Cold War, 124, 142, 157, 159 Cultural Arabism, 144, 149–50, 158, 165 Great Arab Revolt, 86, 150–2, 185

‘Abbas II, 62 ‘Abbasids, 47, 48, 50, 56, 175–81, 185 ‘Abd al-Malik, 58, 175 ‘Abd al-Qadir, 68 ‘Abd al-Rahman, 175 ‘Abd al-Rahman, Moulay, 62 ‘Abd al-Rahman, Tunku, 191 ‘Abd al-Raziq, ‘Ali, 185 Abduh, Muhammad, 149, 183 Abdülhamid I, 62 Abdülhamid II, 58, 66, 181–4 Abou El Fadl, Khaled, 194 Abou-El-Haj, Rifa’at Ali, 76 Abrahamian, Ervand, 12 Abu Dhabi, 130 AbuKhalil, Asad, 161 Abu’l-Qasim al-Zayani, 63 Abu-Nimer, Mohammed, 101 Adelson, Roger, 14, 83 Aden, 6 al-Afghani, 149,181–3 Afghanistan, 11, 14, 16, 22, 104, 137, 194, 207, 229 Africa, 8, 9, 13, 19, 32, 35, 51, 87, 116, 189, 232 Central, 16 East, 52 Horn of, 14 North, 6, 16, 45, 47, 51–4, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 82, 83, 122, 125, 130, 151, 177 Ottoman existence in, 45, 47, 53–4, 57–9, 61–2, 67, 82 sub-Saharan, 59, 65, 237 West, 52, 53, 59, 133 Ahmad al-Bakkay, 59 Ahmad al-Mansur, 58, 63 Ahmad al-Nasiri, 60 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 166 Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, 90 Ajami, Fouad, 13, 151, 157, 158, 162, 218, 246 264



Index

identity, 142–3, 147, 152–4, 156–7, 164, 168, 197–8, 203, 206, 212, 215, 229–30, 235 nationalism, 7, 11, 13, 47, 59, 86, 98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 120, 140–69, 183, 187, 204, 206, 216, 218, 229, 232, 233, 235, 236, 244, 246, 247; see also Arab: Arabism; pan-Arabism New Arab Cold War, 142, 165–9 political Arabism, 142, 144, 148, 151–3, 156, 157–65, 167 post-Arab, 140–2, 157, 158, 162, 165, 166, 169 Prussia, an Arab, 154, 214 unity, 8, 94, 121, 152–5, 188, 214, 216; see also pan-Arabism Arab Agricultural Development Organisation, 219 Arab Cooperation Council, 9, 117, 130–2, 160 Arab Development Fund, 219 Arab Free Trade Zone Agreement, 111 Arab–Israeli dispute, see Israeli–Palestinian conflict Arab League, 8, 29, 34, 44, 47, 97, 111, 117, 121–30, 137, 138–9, 143, 153, 159, 160, 210, 211, 214, 219, 224, 236 Charter, 122–4, 153 and Egypt, 126, 160–1, 211 Joint Defence and Economic Cooperation Treaty, 125, 126 and Kuwait crisis, 101, 126–30, 160–1, 212, 223 sovereignty principle, 121–4, 128, 211, 218 Arab Maghreb Union, 9, 117, 123, 130, 132, 160 North African Common Market, 130 Arab Military Industrial Organisation, 219 Arab Postal Union, 122 Armenia, 14, 16, 149 Asadabadi, Jamal al-Din, see al-Afghani ASEAN, 29, 32, 44

265

Asia, 1, 18, 19, 20, 32, 33, 35, 50, 87, 152, 228, 237 Central, 14, 51, 53, 57, 59, 182 East, 7, 37, 90, 203, 237 Eurasia, 52, 58, 69 Minor, 53 Pacific, 29 South, 182, 186, 188, 229, 230 South-East, 44, 53, 229, 230 West, 90 al-Assad, Hafez, 218, 221, 248 Atatürk, Kemal, 14, 151, 171, 214 Atlantic Community, 29 Ayoob, Mohammed, 27 Ayoub, Mahmoud M., 173 Azerbaijan, 14, 61 Azoury, Negib, 143, 150 Azzam, Abd al-Rahman, 143 Azzam Pasha, 47 Baba, Noor Ahmad, 190 Baghdad, 48, 61, 127, 128, 154, 170, 175, 180 Baghdad Pact, 125, 155, 156, 189, 215 Bahrain, 16, 121, 130 balance of power, 27, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 64, 70, 76, 93, 103, 115, 118, 123, 202, 233, 244 in the Middle East, 85, 90, 124, 126, 132–3, 138–9, 201, 208, 214, 221–2, 224 Middle East and Europe, 64–5, 72–4, 79 Balkans, 6, 14, 16, 35, 53, 54, 55, 65, 86, 137, 138 Bank, André, 168–9 Barbir, Karl K., 80 Barnett, Michael, 95, 146, 163, 168, 169, 209, 215, 216, 219, 230–1 Ba’thism, 120, 135, 154–5, 159, 160, 212, 215, 217, 221 Battle of Çaldiran, 59 Battle of the Three Kings, 58 Bedouins, 143 Beirut, 7, 150 Benaboud, M’Hammed, 62, 63, 67 Bennison, Amira K., 45–69, 134



Index

Berbers, 51, 58, 143, 150 Berridge, Geoff R., 75 bilateralism, 41, 93, 97, 115 in the Middle East, 97–8 Bilgin, Pinar, 160, 161 Bill, James, 109 Binder, Leonard, 88 binding forces, 229 bin Laden, Osama, 12, 194 Bosnia, 4, 16, 191 boundaries, 31, 34, 41, 93, 99, 115 in the Middle East, 48, 50, 60, 61, 69, 82, 84, 85, 158, 172, 180, 203, 208, 209, 211, 214, 228, 230, 244 Brand, Laurie A., 161 British India, 14, 187 Bromley, Simon, 23 Brown, L. Carl, 238 Browne, E. G., 184 Brummett, Palmira, 56, 57, 62 Bull, Hedley, 2, 3, 4, 17, 18, 28, 34, 39, 43, 71, 91, 103, 104, 138, 147 Burke, Samuel M., 187 Bush, George W., 40 Butterfield, Herbert, 73 Buzan, Barry, 23, 24–44, 90, 92, 93, 102, 104, 109, 113, 115, 147, 156, 159, 161, 168, 201, 202, 204, 226–50 Byzantium, 52, 55 Cairo, 56, 66, 67, 68, 120, 121, 122, 126, 128, 129, 138, 153, 155, 180, 181, 183, 186, 187, 216, 217 caliphate, 45, 47, 83, 151, 170–1, 174–86, 194, 231 Arab claim to, 149–51, 178, 183 caliphs, 47, 48, 56, 59, 84, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181–6, 188, 194 Ottoman, 56, 58–9, 69, 119, 134, 181–5 universalism, 48, 58, 135, 170, 183, 199 Camp David Accords, 7, 101, 126, 159–61 Capitulations, 73–6 Catholicism, 52, 73 Chalala, Elie, 150, 155, 160

Charmes, Gabriel, 181 Chechnya, 136, 137 China, 1, 19, 22, 27, 35, 41, 50, 52, 91, 100, 113, 191, 203, 237, 249 Christianity, 20, 29, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55–6, 57, 60–6, 68, 69, 72, 74, 135, 150, 182, 188, 196–7, 233 civil society, 4, 5, 9, 26, 67, 234 Clark, Ian, 240 Clash of Civilisations, 1, 5, 11, 32 climate stability, 41, 93, 115 in the Middle East, 112–14 Cocker, Mark, 23 coercion, 10, 21, 35, 230, 237, 239 coexistence interstate societies, 26, 33, 38–40 in the Middle East, 57, 71, 114, 151–3, 159–61, 200, 229 Cold War, 1, 7, 14, 19, 23, 28, 32, 33, 34, 40, 99, 101, 105, 135, 168, 204, 216, 230, 238, 242, 248 as an institution, 100, 233 Cole, Juan R. I., 183 colonialism, 14, 16, 18, 23, 36, 39, 41, 237 anti-colonialism, 94, 120, 151, 153, 187 decolonisation, 29–30, 39, 81, 88, 230, 237–40, 245, 249 in the Middle East, 6–7, 18–20, 47, 70, 79, 81–4, 107, 109, 119, 120, 121, 154, 182, 189, 209, 228–30, 237–40, 243–6 post-colonial, 70, 95, 98, 117, 145–6, 204, 212, 229, 230, 235, 238, 243–4, 246, 248 communism, 2, 14, 22, 36, 38, 120, 189, 217, 234, 242 competition, 3, 26, 35, 69, 124, 167, 222, 242 concentric circles, 228–9, 233, 244 conflict, 50, 98–100, 103, 115, 167–8, 201; see also Israeli–Palestinian conflict; Sunni–Shi‘i divide; war Constantinople, 55, 71, 76; see also Istanbul constructivism, 2, 168



266 Index

convergence interstate societies, 26, 38, in the Middle East, 154–7 cooperative interstate societies, 26, 38–40 in the Middle East, 57, 71, 153, 157–9, 180–1, 200 core–periphery structures, 35, 39, 46, 49, 202–4, 210, 212–13, 216, 230, 239–40, 245 cosmopolitanism, 5, 170, 234 Cox, Robert, 202 Crimea, 54 Crone, Patricia, 48 Cruce, Emeric, 77 Cyprus, 6, 14, 16 Czaputowicz, Jacek, 27 Damascus, 125, 139, 150, 152, 154, 155, 170, 180 Declaration, 160 dar al-‘ahd, 49 dar al-harb, 45, 47, 49, 50, 55, 68, 74, 134, 135 dar al-islam, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 60, 64, 68, 74, 134–5, 170, 172, 176, 177, 178, 180, 195 dar al-kufr, see dar al-harb dar al-sulh, see dar al-‘ahd Darwish, Adel, 113 Davison, Roderic H., 73, 79, 80 Dawisha, Adeed, 13, 143, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 169, 246 Dehio, Ludwig, 73 democracy, 27, 39, 40–1, 93 in the Middle East, 15, 36, 90–1, 100, 107, 115, 133, 163, 192, 207, 230, 241, 246, 247–9 democratic peace theory, 2 dependency theory, 2, 3 Deringil, Selim, 58 despotism, 1, 20, 88, 183 Diez, Thomas, 27 diplomacy, 5, 27–8, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 93, 233 in the Middle East, 57, 59, 62–4, 68, 75–7, 79, 85, 90, 96–8, 106, 115, 118, 124, 159, 201, 213, 236, 240, 244

267

domains of international relations, 25–32, 39, 43, 229, 230–1, 243, 244–7 interhuman, see interhuman societies interstate, see interstate societies non-state, see non-state transnational, see transnational societies Dow Jones, 112 D’Souza, Rohan, 53 Dunne, Tim, 6, 168 dynasticism, 47, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59, 65, 83, 107, 122, 174–5, 214 dynastic principles, 108–10 Ebu’s-Su’ud, 55, 58 Egypt, 6, 7, 9, 16, 21, 22, 50, 51, 62, 67, 86, 110, 121, 122, 125, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174, 178, 183, 185, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195–8, 204, 205, 206, 207, 214, 215, 219, 221 Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 99, 222 leadership, 8, 102, 120–1, 153, 155, 216–18, 224 Nasserist, 120, 135, 155, 156, 159, 211; see also Nasser, Colonel Gamal Abdel peace agreement with Israel, 8, 101, 126, 128, 159, 160, 220 and Syria, see United Arab Republic and the West, 7, 79, 81, 83, 87, 89, 101, 126, 129, 137, 155, 160 elites European/Western, 87 Middle Eastern, see ruling elites El-Sayed, Yassin, 158, 219 embassies, 41, 57, 62, 74–5 ambassadors, 62, 63, 67, 72, 74–6, 182 Energy Bulletin, 100, 249 English school, 2–6, 17–18, 21, 23, 24–7, 38, 100, 133, 167–8, 226–50



Index

English school – (continued) classical variant, 2, 3, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 70, 71, 91, 147, 168, 235, 237, 240, 242, 249 historical perspective, 3, 12, 19–20, 243–4 Middle East, 2, 6–10, 14, 21–2, 43, 92–116, 167–8, 226–50 Ottoman Empire, 45–69 regional level, 14, 27–37, 42–4, 102, 325–7, 237–42 structural approach, 37–42 environmental stewardship, 26, 40, 93, 115 global warming, 112–13, 248 in the Middle East, 112–13, 115 equality of people, 39, 40, 75, 77, 93, 114, 115, 179 in the Middle East, 107–10, 115 Erslev Andersen, Lars, 168, 169 Esposito, John L., 196 Eurocentrism, 10, 46 Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, 111 Europe, balance of power system, 72–4 Concert of, 77 diplomatic relations with Ottomans, 74–6 eastern, 45, 86 impact on the Middle East, 82–9 international system, 71, 78 state system, 1, 46, 52, 56, 72, 74 Western, 69 European Community, 132 European Union, 26, 28, 29, 44, 110, 111, 113, 163, 168, 229, 239 Evans, Graham, 106 Faisal I of Iraq, 152 Faisal of Saudi Arabia, 189, 190, 218 Faksh, Mahmud A., 160 Far East, 14 Faroqhi, Suraiya, 59 al-Fasi, ‘Allal, 47 fatwa/fatawa, 68, 184, 194 Fawcett, Louise, 23 Fertile Crescent, 106, 152, 214 Fes, 51, 61, 67, 68

financial liberalisation, 40, 41, 93, 115 in the Middle East, 112 Findley, Carter V., 80 first-order societies, 37 First World War, 6, 14, 20, 45, 77, 79, 84, 86, 97, 119, 151, 154, 171, 184, 228, 238 Fleischer, Cornell, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58 France, 22, 63, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 86, 184, 186, 195–7, 214 and the Middle East, 7, 20, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 82, 83, 94, 119–21, 152, 156, 181 French revolution, 11, 12, 86 Fromkin, David, 6 FTSE, 112 Fuller, Graham E., 141, 165 Furia, Peter, 163 Galtung, Johan, 203, 210, 230 GATT, 41 Gause, F. Gregory, 158, 159 Gellner, Ernest, 19 Georgia, 14, 61, 65 Gerges, Fawaz A., 23 Germany, 13, 121, 195–7 ghaza, see jihad ghazi, 55 al-Ghazali, 48, 177 Ghuzz Turks, 45, 55 Gibb, Hamilton A. R., 179 globalisation, 4, 30, 31, 57, 111, 112, 193 anti-globalisation movements, 5, 42 global level, 24, 28, 30–4, 36, 37–43, 56, 69, 85, 89–91, 92–3, 95–6, 97–8, 99–100, 101–3, 104–5, 107, 108–10, 111–12, 113–14, 114–16, 142, 145, 153, 159, 162, 168, 193, 194, 202, 204–5, 208–9, 226–7, 228, 230, 231–4, 237–42, 242–50 and international society, 30, 32, 34 , 37–42, 43, 89–91, 92, 93–114, 115–16, 141, 147, 156, 157, 170, 203, 208–9, 232–3, 237–8, 240, 245, 246, 247–50



268 Index

Goffman, Daniel, 74, 75 Gonzalez-Pelaez, Ana, 92–116, 226–50 Greater Arab Free Trade Area, 111 great power management, 33, 38–40, 93, 100–1, 115 in the Middle East, 90, 98, 100–3, 114, 115, 118, 124, 212–13, 233, 236 and Ottoman Empire, 77–8 Greece, 19, 31, 56, 149, 228 Green, Jerrold, 141 Greenpeace, 5 Grotianism, 2, 25, 37, 38 Grotius, Hugo, 76 Gruffydd Jones, Branwen, 11 Guilmartin, John, 50 Gulf Cooperation Council, 9, 111, 117, 123, 130–1, 160, 236 Charter, 130, 131 Peninsula Shield Force, 131 Gulf states, 6, 9, 98, 122, 125, 126, 128, 131, 134, 136, 143, 161, 209 Gulf War First, 4, 95, 97–8, 101, 103, 105, 106, 127, 137, 160, 192, 211, 223, 224, 225 Second, see Iraq: Anglo-US invasion Habsburg Empire, 53, 55, 56, 58, 64, 69, 72, 73 hadith, 172, 173, 178, 185 Haim, Sylvia G., 184 hajj, 51, 59, 66, 135, 180 Halliday, Fred, 1–23, 24, 42, 83, 84, 89, 96, 112, 227, 229, 234, 242, 244, 245, 247 Hamas, 138, 141, 166, 192, 248 Harbourne, Sir William, 75 Harik, Iliya, 84, 151 Hashemites, 152–4, 185, 214, 215 Hashmi, Sohail H., 170–200 hegemony, 10, 21, 35, 40, 52, 56, 72, 101, 102, 105, 126, 128, 156, 202, 203, 204–13, 216–18, 220, 222, 223, 224–5, 240, 248 hegemonic stability, 41, 93, 112, 115

269

Heikal, Mohammed Hassanein, 155, 204 Herb, Michael, 110 Hijaz, 66, 67, 80, 89, 150, 174, 185 Hijra, 172, 173 Hinnebusch, Raymond, 96, 143, 145, 146, 158, 159, 168, 201–24 Hinsley, Francis H., 77 Hizb al-Tahrir, 194–5, 199 Hizbullah, 15, 138, 140–1, 162, 165, 166, 205, 206, 207, 223 Hobbesianism, 25, 37, 201 Hobsbawm, Eric, 19 Hodgson, Marshall, 53, 57 Holsti, Kalevi J., 240 Holy Roman Empire, 55, 56, 77 Horowitz, Richard S., 76 Hourani, Albert, 81, 86, 149, 152, 159, 186 Hove, Søren, 169 Hudson, Michael C., 146 humanitarian intervention, 4, 5, 40, 41, 93, 10, 107, 108, 115, 135, 166 human rights, 5, 26, 27, 39–41, 90, 93, 100, 107–8, 115, 127, 192, 234, 241, 248, 249 Huntington, Samuel P., 32, 204 Hurewitz, J. C., 75 Husayn, Imam, 174–5 Husayn, Sharif of Mecca, 150, 152, 185 al-Husayni, Amin, 189 al-Husri, Sati, 143, 154 Hussain, Arif, 189 Hussein, King, 157 Hussein, Saddam, 98, 110, 126–9, 131, 132, 138, 160, 161, 204, 206, 212, 223, 248 IAGS, 100, 248 Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, 179 Ibn Abi Ya‘la, 177 Ibn Battuta, 52 Ibn Hanbal, 177 Ibn Ishaq, 173–4 Ibn Jama‘a, 177 Ibn Khaldun, 143, 149, 177



Index

Ibn Taymiyya, 52, 177 Ibn ‘Uthman, 67 Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 160 imam/imamate, see caliphate Imber, Colin, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58 imperialism, 9, 10, 12, 19, 23, 34, 36, 39, 52, 66, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 83, 88, 94, 118, 120, 124, 125, 154, 155, 175, 188, 203, 204, 212–16, 223, 233 anti-imperialism, 12, 141, 156, 165, 204, 207, 212–13, 225, 230, 235, 236, 239, 242, 248 neo-imperialism, 36, 206, 215, 228 Inalcık, Halil, 72, 73 India, 19, 51, 53, 58, 68, 91, 182, 184–7, 190, 191, 196 British, 14 Mughal Empire, 53, 56, 57, 59, 177 Indonesia, 13, 136, 190, 195, 196 INGOs, 159 Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, 100, 248 institutions derivative, see primary institutions master, see primary institutions primary, see primary institutions relation between primary and secondary, 236–7 secondary, see secondary institutions interhuman societies, 26, 29–30, 37 interhuman domain, 28, 29, 32, 36, 38–9, 226–47 Middle East, 45, 48, 90–1, 136, 171, 195–8, 203, 206, 209, 211–13, 225, 226–47 international community, 115, 128, 240 international law, 27, 28, 36, 38, 40, 41, 46, 93, 233, 240 in the Middle East, 59, 63, 76–7, 85, 90, 115, 135–6, 200, 213, 236 international relations, 1–6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 49, 50, 55, 63, 76, 79, 134, 139, 141, 157, 167, 168, 243, 249

international society, 1–23, 25–8, 35, 36, 70–91, 92, 133, 201–25, 237, 240–2, 245 anarchical, 118, 123, 139, 144–5, 147, 168 dead-letter, 117–18, 123, 129, 139, 236 European, 31, 38, 70–91, 213, 233, 237, 242 expansion of, 3, 17, 18–19, 31, 38, 70–91, 213, 237, 242 global, 30, 32, 34, 37–42, 43, 89–91, 92, 93–114, 115–16, 141, 147, 156, 157, 170, 203, 208–9, 232–3, 237–8, 240, 245, 246, 247–50 Middle East, 33, 42–3, 48, 71–91, 92, 93–114, 115–16, 117–19, 121, 123, 129, 131–2, 133–7, 139, 141, 142, 144–7, 149, 156, 157, 160–2, 167, 168, 198–200, 207–8, 208–13, 218–21, 222, 223, 224–5, 228, 230, 232, 237, 242, 243, 246, 247–50 regional, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39, 43, 90, 91, 92, 93–114, 131–2, 133–7, 142, 144–7, 156, 168, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207–8, 208–13, 213–15, 223, 224, 228, 237–8, 240, 241, 243 international systems, 3, 5, 17–18, 22, 23, 25, 28, 33, 37–8, 64, 71, 202 European, 71, 78 Middle East, 22, 46, 48, 53, 57–8, 64, 68, 69, 102, 117–19, 119–21, 124, 132, 134, 136, 137–8 interpretivism, 118, 123 interstate societies, 26, 28, 30, 31–2, 33–43, 141, 168, 223, 227 European, 28, 35, 151 expansion, 28, 35 global, 33, 39, 41, 42, 90, 142, 162 interstate domain, 27–8, 30, 31–2, 37–41, 43, 101, 104, 141, 142, 162, 165, 168, 171, 189–90, 211, 223, 226–7, 227–31, 231–47



270 Index

Middle East, 45, 89, 92–116, 117–39, 141–2, 147, 151–61, 162, 170, 225, 227–31, 232–47 regional, 29, 31, 32, 33–4, 35, 42, 45, 92–116, 117–39, 168, 232 interstate system, 3, 5, 20, 45 Middle East, 45, 84–5, 91 Iran, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 45, 46, 50, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 81, 82, 83, 84, 99, 102, 104, 107, 126, 131, 134, 135, 138, 160, 166, 171, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 187, 191, 192, 203, 205, 207, 211, 216, 221, 222, 229, 249 Islamic revolution, 15, 22, 134, 160, 200, 206, 222–3, 248 nuclear programme, 12, 15 Safavids, see Safavid dynasty shah, 7, 16, 248 Shi‘ism, 45, 55, 57, 61, 65–6, 140–1, 171, 180–3, 192 see also Persia Iran–Iraq War, 18, 103, 130, 171, 192, 221–2 Iraq, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 22, 50, 60, 61, 62, 66, 82, 83, 89, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 110, 119, 120, 121, 124–32, 137, 152, 154, 163, 164, 171, 182, 187, 192, 195, 208, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 248 Anglo-US invasion, 4, 7, 15, 18, 36, 104–5, 108, 123, 137, 138, 162, 182, 205, 223, 239, 248–9 Ba’thism, 160, 212, 221 invasion of Kuwait, 4, 7, 8, 9, 16, 98, 101, 103, 108, 113, 127–9, 132, 146, 160–1, 192, 209, 212, 222, 223 Islam, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 12, 19, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 45–53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 66, 69, 73, 83, 88, 95–6, 108, 133–7, 140, 144, 149–52, 158, 162–8, 170–200, 206, 209–12, 222–3, 229, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236, 241–2, 244–6 classical political theories, 47–53, 175–80

271

fundamentalism, 90, 199, 205, 249 economics, 111–12 identity, 29, 53, 61, 65, 66, 136, 151, 156, 164, 170, 196–8, 212, 215, 230, 244 Islamism, see pan-Islamism Islamist movements, 83, 87, 91 political, 199, 206, 210, 213, 222, 223, 248 universalism, 45, 47–8, 134–5, 170 values, 2, 10, 135, 199 women, 108, 193–4 Islamic Economic Conference, 188 Islamic unity, see pan-Islamism Islamistan, 187–8 Israel, 7, 8, 15, 16, 18, 97, 98–100, 104, 111, 120, 124–7, 129, 131, 136, 140–1, 146, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 165–6, 171, 188, 190, 191, 198, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 211–13, 215, 217–22, 224, 229, 230, 235, 237, 238, 247, 248, 249 occupation of Lebanon, 126, 160, 165–6, 205, 221–2 Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 7, 95, 98–100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 114–15, 129, 138, 191, 212, 216, 222, 232, 233, 241, 247–9 Istanbul, 54, 58, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 150, 183; see also Constantinople Italy, 13, 20, 71, 72, 74 IT revolution, 9 al-Jabarti, 67 Jackson, Peter, 63 Janissaries, 65, 88 recruitment, 58 revolt, 54 al Jazeera, 9–10, 16, 140, 163–6, 194 Jeddah, 135, 171 Jerusalem, 126, 135, 155, 170, 180, 186, 189, 190, 194 East, 129, 137 jihad, 22, 50, 55, 56, 59, 63, 68, 69, 184, 194, 200



Index

Jordan, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 87, 94, 97, 99, 125, 129, 134, 140, 141, 156, 157, 160, 161, 165, 166, 192, 195, 196, 198, 214, 217 Transjordan, 89, 119, 121, 152 Joseph, Jonathan, 202 Kamrava, Mehran, 23 Kandil, Hamdi, 158 Kantianism, 25, 37, 38, 157, 168 Karpat, Kemal, 80 Kashmir, 136, 137, 186, 189, 191 Katib Çelebi, 54 al-Kawakibi, Abdal-Rahman, 150, 183 Kazakhstan, 190 ‘Kazanistan’, 2 Kazziha, Walid, 159 Keal, Paul, 23, 237, 240 Keddie, Nikki R., 182, 183 Keene, Edward, 23, 39, 240 Kemal, Namik, 181 Kerr, Malcolm, 157, 158, 183, 219 Khalidi, Rashid, 144, 169 Khalidi, Walid, 144, 155 khalifa, see caliphate Khaliq al-Zaman, Chaudhry, 187–8 khan, 48, 50, 54, 62, 189 khanate, 50, 53, 59 Khasawneh, Nasser Ali, 111 Khawarij, 178–80 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 7, 12, 192, 207 Khouri, Rami, 141 Kienle, Eberhard, 145, 152, 153, 154, 169 Koebner, Richard, 77 Korany, Bahgat, 84, 146 Kramer, Martin, 149, 152, 161, 186 Kuneralp, Sinan, 81 Kurds, 7, 9, 16, 21, 106, 175, 178, 203, 209, 235, 236 Kürkçüo˘ glu, Ömer, 86 Kuwait, 16, 101, 121, 124, 130, 131, 198 invasion by Iraq, 4, 7, 8, 9, 16, 98, 101, 103, 108, 113, 127, 128–9, 132, 146, 160–1, 192, 209, 212, 222, 223 Kyoto Protocol, 41, 112–13

Landau, Jacob M., 181, 188 Land Code, 80 Latin America, 7, 8, 9, 13, 19, 143, 237 Lausanne Treaty, 6, 16 Lawrence, Bruce, 194 Lawrence, T. E., 142 League of Arab States, see Arab League League of Nations, 5 Lebanon, 6, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 82, 94, 97, 99, 107, 119, 121, 127, 128, 132, 137, 138–9, 152, 195–8, 209, 217 occupation by Israel, 126, 160, 165–6, 205, 221–2 Lecker, Michael, 174 Lee, Dwight E., 181 Levant, 73, 119, 120, 125, 132, 151, 152, 160, 206 Lewis, Bernard, 81, 83, 88, 89 liberalism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 26–7, 29, 31, 36, 38, 39, 40–1, 43, 93, 133, 149, 206, 214, 242 in the Middle East, 110–12, 115, 130 Libya, 9, 11, 16, 22, 121, 126, 129, 130, 158, 219 Little, Richard, 23 Lockhart, Laurence, 63 Lucas, Russell, 163 Lustick, Ian S., 102, 245 Lynch, Marc, 141, 158, 162, 163, 164, 235 Macartney, Lord, 75 McChesney, Robert D., 7, 62 Mackinder, Halford, 14–15 Maddy-Weizman, Bruce, 214 Maghreb, 67, 82, 132, 151 Malaysia, 136, 191 Mamluk sultanate, 50–1, 62 Mandaville, Peter, 192, 200 Mansell, Philip, 75, 76 Mardin, S¸ erif, 181 market, 19, 27, 36, 39–42, 84, 93, 110–12, 115, 118, 122, 125, 130, 132, 163, 164, 205, 213, 219, 220, 248



272 Index

Marxism, 3, 12, 154, 202, 242 Mattingly, Garret, 72, 75, 76 Mauritania, 14, 121, 129, 130 al-Mawardi, 177 Mayall, James, 2, 106 Mecca, 51, 54, 55, 59, 68, 170, 172, 174, 178, 180, 183, 185, 186, 193 media, 9, 16, 42, 46, 142, 151, 163–4, 165, 181 Medina, 55, 59, 170, 172, 174, 178, 180, 195 Mediterranean, 45, 50, 53, 60, 175 Mesopotamia, 50, 178 Metternich, Prince von, 76 MFN Agreements, 41 Middle East anti-hegemonism, 101–2, 202, 203, 205–6, 216–17, 222 creation of, 6, 119 diplomacy, 62–3, 74–6, 79, 96–8, 243–4 economics, 110–12, 204–5, 219–21 and English school, 2, 6–10, 14, 21–2, 43, 92–116, 167–8, 226–50 equality of people, 107–110; see also ruling elites great power management, 90, 98, 100–3, 114, 115, 118, 124, 212–13, 233, 236 interstate vs non-state domains, 90–1, 211, 224–5, 227–31, 231–7, 239, 241–2, 244 legitimacy of states, 11, 55, 59, 60, 68, 84, 95, 117, 119–21, 124, 129, 153, 159, 166, 199, 207, 211, 212, 215, 217–18, 223, 228, 230, 239–40, 246, 247 Ottoman legacy, 59–65, 70, 79–82, 84, 89–90, 98, 238, 243 post-colonial, 70, 95, 98, 117, 145–6, 204, 212, 229, 230, 235, 238, 243–4, 246, 248 primary institutions, 71–9, 92–116, 171–2, 210, 231–7, 246–7 secondary institutions, 117–39 sovereignty, 48–9, 54, 58–60, 80–5, 88, 90, 93–8, 105–7, 114–16, 118, 119, 122–4, 127,

273

128, 133, 134, 135, 153, 156, 159, 161, 168, 176–7, 185, 200, 201, 205, 206, 208–12, 213, 218, 220, 223, 224, 229, 231, 236, 240, 244–5 territoriality, 81–6, 90, 94, 98–100, 103, 105, 106, 119, 121, 123–4, 132–4, 137–8, 143–4, 151, 152, 155, 159, 160, 180, 203, 208, 209, 224, 231, 235, 244 values, 2, 10–13, 19, 22, 67, 79, 91, 123, 127, 132, 144, 158 wars, 49–50, 59, 61–4, 76, 78–9, 90, 98–9, 102, 103–5, 106, 114, 115, 156, 205, 211, 233, 236 world society, 45, 47, 65–9, 91, 95, 101, 136–7, 140–2, 147–9, 149–51, 152–3, 156, 161, 162–4, 165, 167, 246 Middle East Economic Survey, 111 Mishal, Khalid, 166 Moalla, Asma, 54, 64 Mogahed, Dalia, 196 Mongol, 48, 50–3, 175, 178; see also Turco-Mongol Montreal Protocol, 41 Morocco, 9, 11, 16, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 121, 127, 128, 130, 132, 143, 191, 196, 198 Mosul Treaty, 6 Mottahedeh, Roy P., 179 Mubarak, Husni, 110, 126–8, 192 Muhammad, see Prophet Muhammad Muhammad Badi‘, 62 multiculturalism, 31, 41, 42 multilateralism, 40–1, 93, 115 in the Middle East, 97–8 Murden, Simon, 117–39, 190 Murphey, Rhoads, 53, 57, 61 Murphy, Dan, 141 Muslim, see Islam Muslim World League, 189, 193 Mustafa Âli, 55, 56, 58 Naff, Thomas, 76, 78, 79, 151 Nagorno-Karabakh, 16 Nahda movement, 150



Index

274 Index Middle East, 66–9, 141–2, 165–7, 236 networks, 4, 15 Nye, Joseph S., 36, 147 October War, 125–6, 157, 205, 218–20 Oghuz Turks, 55 oil, 7, 95, 98, 101, 113, 122, 125, 128, 130, 158, 160, 161, 171, 203–7, 218–22, 224, 237, 248–9 and market, 110–11, 248 restrictions on, 125 revenues, 7, 110, 158–9, 217, 221–2 Oman, 6, 16, 127, 130 Organisation of African Unity, 9 Organisation of the Islamic Conference, 8, 44, 96, 117, 123, 135–6, 171, 190–1, 192, 193, 200, 210, 211, 217, 224, 236 Charter, 135, 191–3 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, 117, 125 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, 125, 204 Orientalism, 2, 19, 20, 184 Ottoman Empire, 1, 6, 14, 20, 42, 45–69, 70–91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 102, 106, 119, 134, 142, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 170, 177, 180–6, 192, 208, 228, 237, 238, 243, 244, 247 balance of power, 63–5, 72–4, 243–4 diplomacy, 62–3, 74–6, 79, 243–4 and Europe, 56–7, 71–9, 79–81 great power management, 77–8 international law, 63, 76–7, 243–4 territoriality, 81–2, 243–4 trade, 68, 72–3 wars, 60–2, 78–9 Young Ottomans, 181, 184 Owen, Roger, 146, 155, 158 Özbudun, Ergun, 80 Özcan, Azmi, 184 Paidar, Parvin, 11 Pakistan, 11, 15, 134, 135, 187–91, 194, 195, 196



Najaf, 66 Napoleon, 9, 79 al-Nasiri, 60 Nasr, Vali, 162 Nasrallah, Hassan, 141, 165, 266, 267 Nasser, Colonel Gamal Abdel, 120, 123, 125, 135, 138, 141, 146, 155–6, 158, 159, 163–5, 167, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212, 215–20, 223, 224, 248 coup d’état in Egypt, 120, 155, 206 nationalism, 13, 27, 31, 36, 40, 41, 43, 81, 85–8, 90, 93, 98, 118, 168, 212, 214, 240, 247 Arab, see pan-Arabism civic-territorial, 86 ethnic-linguistic, 86, 171 ideology, 105–6 Islamic, see pan-Islamism in the Middle East, 82–9, 105–7, 115, 208–9; see also pan-Arabism; pan-Islamism territorial, 94 nation-state, 31, 51, 72, 78, 80, 105, 222, 223, 234 Middle East, 47, 74, 82–9, 90, 144–5, 150, 155, 158, 199, 209, 223 NATO, 35, 41 neo-Gramscian approach, 42, 201–25 Neumann, Iver B., 78 Newnham, Jeffrey, 106 Niger, 191 Nigeria, 13, 190, 195–7 Noble, Paul, 145, 158, 216 non-governmental organisations, 4, 9, 193 non-intervention, 27, 40, 41, 60, 93, 96, 97, 115, 147, 153, 209, 229, 231, 236 non-state actors/organisations, 9, 16, 24, 25, 26, 30, 35, 68, 141–2, 157, 161, 162, 165–7, 234–6 domain, 26, 30–1, 43, 99, 236, 244, 245

Palabıyık, M. Serdar, 78 Palestine, 6, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 22, 82, 83, 87, 94–100, 101, 104–8, 114–15, 119–22, 129, 136, 137, 140, 141, 144, 146, 151–66, 186, 188–92, 203, 209, 211, 214, 216, 217, 233, 248 nationalism, 106, 157, 209 Palestinian Liberation Organization, 9, 16, 121, 129, 157, 211 pan-Africanism, 32 pan-Arabism, 8, 13, 32, 42, 85, 86, 87, 94–5, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127, 131, 132, 137, 140–69, 171, 188, 198–9, 205, 206, 210, 212, 214, 215–18, 219–21, 223, 224, 248 and Nasser, 155–6, 164, 204, 211, 215–17, 218–20, 224 in the non-state domains, 105–7, 137, 223–4, 234–5, 246 qawmiyya, 106, 143 regional institution, 105–7, 114–15, 210–11, 216, 233–4, 235–6 revolutionary, 154–7, 164, 167, 188 sectarianism, 61, 173, 180, 183, 192 wataniyya, 106, 143, 152, 158, 188 pan-Islamism, 8, 10, 32, 42, 59, 69, 85, 123, 135, 137, 205, 210, 217, 223, 224, 230, 246 in the interstate domain, 190–3, 199–200, 223 and Middle East, 170–200, 223 modern, 180–98 in the non-state domains, 193–8, 199–200, 223–4, 234–5, 246 and Ottoman Empire, 180–5 regional institution, 210, 235–7 pan-Turkism, 85 papacy, 48, 72 pope, 72, 77 Pappe, Ilan, 23 Paris Conference, 76, 78 Paris Treaty, 71, 77 patriarchism, 109 patrimonialism, 107, 109, 112, 205, 213

275

patronage, 66, 109, 133, 189 peacekeeping operations, 41 Pearson, M., 51 Penn, William, 77 periphery, see core–periphery structures Persia, 1, 20, 22, 56, 65, 66, 176, 179, 180, 192 Gulf, 64, 83, 192 Pew Global Attitudes Project, 195–8 Philippines, 133, 137 pilgrimage, 51, 59, 62, 66, 67, 69, 179 PKK, 9, 16 pluralism, 26, 27, 33 interstate society, 28, 35, 37–8, 41, 91 Middle East, 48, 138, 142, 147, 153, 161, 170, 171, 172, 199 second-order, 33 Poland, 56, 63, 69 Polanyi, Karl, 19 popular sovereignty, 40–1, 93, 107, 115 in the Middle East, 107 Porte, see Sublime Porte Portugal, 23, 52, 58, 64 post-modernism, 5 power political societies, 37, 159, 229 in the Middle East, 159–61 power politics, 25, 225 primary institutions, 27, 37, 39–44, 115, 117, 229, 243, 246–7 derivative institutions, 40–1, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 147, 212 master institutions, 40, 72, 93, 99, 104, 105, 114, 115, 147, 153, 156, 159, 168 in the Middle East, 71–9, 92–116, 171–2, 210, 231–7, 246–7 Prophet Muhammad, 47, 58, 59, 65, 134, 172–4, 176, 178, 179, 185, 194–5 Protestantism, 72, 73 al-Qadhafi, Muammar, 158 al Qaeda, 4, 12, 15, 26, 104, 105, 194, 207



Index

Qajar dynasty, 46 al-Qaradawi, Yusif, 141, 164 Qatar, 10, 16, 121, 130, 164 Qur’an, 12, 17, 20, 149, 172–3, 176, 178, 179, 183, 185 Quraysh, 150, 178 Rabat, 122, 135 rationalism, 25 Rawls, John, 2 Raymond, André, 82 al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din, 173 realism, 4, 5, 6, 17, 25, 26, 38, 145, 147, 202, 222, 242 classical variant, 2, 3, 17, 215 realpolitik, 68 regionalism, see sub-global societies regional level, see sub-global societies revolutionism, 24, 231, 234, 235, 241, 246 in Middle East, 154–7 Rice, Condoleezza, 140 Rida, Rashid, 183, 185–6 Rodinson, Maxime, 73 Rogan, Eugene, 80 Rome, 19, 63 Roy, Olivier, 193 Rubin, Barry, 141 ruling elites, 6, 9, 59, 83, 120, 230 regional derivative institution, 108–10, 114–15 see also dynasticism; patrimonialism Russia, 22, 29, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 73, 76, 181, 182, 191, 197 Saada, Antun, 152 Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal, 141 Sadat, Anwar, 7, 126, 159, 218, 220 Safavid dynasty, 45, 46, 53, 56–66, 177, 180, 192 Sahara, 59, 65, 66, 82, 237 Western, 14, 16, 132 Saikal, Amin, 88 Saint-Pierre, 77 Satloff, Robert, 162 Saudi Arabia, 8, 10, 11, 16, 20, 94, 106, 121, 125, 128, 130, 131–2, 135, 139, 140, 153, 156, 159, 160,

165–7, 171, 187, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 205, 211, 214, 216, 218–19, 224, 249 and the West, 7, 101, 129, 137–8, 207, 220, 222 Sayigh, Yezid, 223 science, 36, 39, 40, 41 SEATO, 189 secondary institutions, 39–44, 213, 243 definition, 27, 37 and international society, 43–4 in the Middle East, 42–3, 117–39, 153, 158–60, 210, 231–7 subregionalisation, 130–3 Second Holy League, 72 second-order societies, 37–8 Second World War, 30, 95, 121, 186 secularism, 50, 55, 230 in the Middle East, 78, 83, 87–91, 96, 135, 150, 154, 164, 167, 171, 188, 195, 206, 223, 244, 248 security complex, 203, 229 Segal, Gerald, 41 Sela, Avraham, 218, 219, 221 self-determination principle, 40–1, 93, 187 in the Middle East, 10–11, 86, 106–7, 115, 121, 151, 152, 153, 208, 210 Selim I, 62, 181 Selim III, 76, 79 Seljuk Turks, 55 Senegal, 191 September 11, 2001, 32, 104 Sharabi, Hisham, 109 Shari‘a, 48, 49, 55, 63, 74, 134, 164, 176–7 Sharoni, Simona, 101 Shawkat ‘Ali, 184, 186 Shi‘ism, 45, 55, 61, 66, 140–1, 162, 165, 171, 174–7, 180, 182–3, 186, 192, 222 Crescent, 192 Imami, 57 Twelver Shi‘i state, 65, 66, 192 Shlaim, Avi, 81, 84 Shu‘ubiyya movement, 179–80, 184, 192



276 Index

Singh, Sangat, 188 Sirriyeh, Hussein, 155, 160, 161, 169 Six Day War, 125, 157–8, 171, 190, 205, 206, 217–18 Sluglett, Peter, 120 Smith, Anthony D., 86, 235 Smith, Charles, D., 217, 220 social movements, 22, 202, 206–7, 213, 234, 237, 245 revolts, revolutions, 2, 4, 12, 18, 21, 22, 107, 201, 204–5, 207 solidarism definition, 26–7 societies, 35, 37–8, 158–9, 168 Islam, 133–9, 170–2, 199 in the Middle East, 91, 118–19, 121, 122–3, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 138–9, 142, 147, 153, 156, 159, 229, 240 Somalia, 8, 121 Sourdel, D., 182 sovereignty, 10–11, 27–8, 33–41, 72, 214, 233 equality, 135, 240, 245 global, 93–5 low salience of, 15–16, 96, 228 in the Middle East, 48–9, 54, 58–60, 80–5, 88, 90, 93–8, 105–7, 114–16, 118, 119, 122–4, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135, 153, 156, 159, 161, 168, 176–7, 185, 200, 201, 205, 206, 208–12, 213, 218, 220, 223, 224, 229, 231, 236, 240, 244–5 regional, 95–6 territorial, 39, 84, 85, 90, 208 Soviet Union, 7, 14, 18, 36, 41, 127, 194, 216, 230, 238 Spain, 52, 61, 63, 64, 73, 143, 175, 177, 195–7 species survival, 41, 93, 115 Springborg, Robert, 109 state centralisation, 82–9 formation, 70, 79–89, 93–6, 102, 198, 213, 222 rentier states, 109, 204, 213 sovereign territorial, 39, 84, 85, 90, 208

277

Stivachtis, Yannis A., 27 Stowall, Howard, 113 sub-global societies, 39, 69 Arab, 111, 167, 142, 144–7, 156, 205 and English school, 14, 27–37, 42–4, 102, 325–7, 237–42 and global level, 28, 30, 32–7, 42, 91, 95–6, 97–8, 99–100, 101–3, 104–5, 107, 108–10, 111–12, 113–14, 114–16, 168, 202, 237–42, 243, 247 hegemony, 203, 205, 211, 215–18 interhuman domain/society, 30, 32, 48, 203, 209, 211, 212, 213, 227–31, 247 international society, 29, 30, 32–4, 36, 39, 43, 90, 91, 92, 93–114, 131–2, 133–7, 142, 144–7, 156, 168, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207–8, 208–13, 213–15, 223, 224, 228, 237–8, 240, 241, 243 interstate domain/society, 29, 31, 32–5, 42, 45, 92–116, 117–39, 168, 227–31, 232 level, 1–2, 13–15, 17, 22, 24, 27–37, 42–4, 46, 92–116, 117–39, 144–7, 163, 201–3, 226–42, 233, 244 Middle East, 13–15, 42, 46–8, 50, 56–7, 59, 63, 69, 90–1, 92–116, 117–39, 167–9, 172, 198–200, 202, 203–5, 207–8, 208–13, 213–25, 226–42, 243, 249–50 Muslim, 45–6, 69, 133–7, 198–200 primary institutions, 92, 93–115, 201, 208–13, 216, 224, 231–7 secondary institutions, 117–39, 160, 236–7 systems, 46, 48, 50, 56, 57, 59, 63, 69, 124, 132, 138, 158, 203, 207–8, 209, 223, 224–5, 247 transnational domain/society, 30, 227–31, 247 world society, 47, 95, 141, 150, 152, 153 Sublime Porte, 60, 73–7 Sudan, 7, 11, 16, 22, 121, 122, 129, 134, 14, 219



Index

Suez Crisis, 7, 156, 205, 210, 212, 215, 216 Sufism, 51, 66–7, 175, 193 Summer War 2006, 140–2, 162, 165–7, 169 Sunni-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, 141, 163, 188–9, 215 Sunni–Shi‘i divide, 57, 61, 105, 108, 140–1, 162, 169, 175, 177, 182, 192, 195, 212 Sunnism, 49, 57, 66, 175–7, 182, 192 Hanafi, 49, 65, 66 Madhhab, 175 Maliki, 65, 66 moderate Sunni-Arab regimes, 138, 140, 162, 166 Susser, Asher, 140, 162 suzerainty, 27, 149, 150, 182 Syria, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 62, 83, 89, 94, 97, 99, 106, 110, 119, 120–1, 122–3, 125–8, 132, 143, 152–4, 157, 178, 183, 185, 187, 188, 192, 207, 214, 218–22 Ba’thists, 159–60, 212, 217 coup d’état, 7, 120 and Egypt, see United Arab Republic Greater Syria, 67, 152–4, 214 and the US, 101, 104, 138, 160 Ta’if process, 128, 132 talab al-‘ilm, 51 tanzimat, 79, 149, 208 Taylor, Alan, 218 Telhami, Shibley, 141, 146, 162, 163, 164, 218 territoriality, 27, 33, 36, 38–40 Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 98–100 in the Middle East, 81–6, 90, 94, 98–100, 103, 105, 106, 119, 121, 123–4, 132–4, 137–8, 143–4, 151, 152, 155, 159, 160, 180, 203, 208, 209, 224, 231, 235, 244 see also nationalism terrorism, 1, 4, 98, 101, 104, 105, 193, 194, 248 Tibi, Bassam, 23, 143, 154 Tlemsen, 51, 60, 62 trade liberalisation, 40–1, 93

in the Middle East, 110–12, 115 Transcaucasia, 6, 14, 16 transnational actors, 8, 9, 37, 39, 119, 136–7 organisations, 235–6 transnational societies, 26, 30, 52 in the Middle East, 90–1, 104, 106–7, 137, 167, 170, 189, 193–5, 199, 227–31, 234–7, 239, 243–7 transnational domain, 27–30, 37–9, 42, 226–7 transstate societies actors/movements, 201, 203, 207–8, 210–12, 214 in the Middle East, 210, 215–18, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224 Muslim, 45, 47, 65–9 Treaties of Utrecht, 77 Treaty of Amasya, 61 Treaty of Istanbul, 61 Treaty of Karlowitz, 63, 76 Treaty of Kuçuk Kaynarja, 57, 64, 181–2 Treaty of Paris, see Paris Treaty Treaty of Zuhab, 61, 62 tribalism, 47, 51, 60, 83, 85, 86, 119, 151, 174, 179, 197 Tripoli, 54, 59, 61, 80, 82 Tripp, Charles, 121, 132, 133 Tunisia, 9, 16, 64, 121, 129, 130, 149, 158, 181, 191 Tunis, 51, 54, 59, 61, 67, 68, 82, 126, 129 Turco-Mongol, 45–6, 50, 55–6, 58–9, 69 Türkegeldi, Ali Fuat, 78 Turkey, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 72, 77, 83, 99, 113, 136, 185, 191, 195–6, 203, 214, 229, 249–50 secularism, 171, 195 Turks, 1, 46, 50, 55–6, 58–9, 66, 72, 73, 78, 83, 86, 150, 171, 175, 178, 183–5, 195 Turkification, 106, 149 Young Turks, 86, 149, 184 Uganda, 191 UK, 35, 73, 194, 196–7, 232 English, 10, 72–3, 86



278 Index

and the Middle East, 4, 7, 20, 64, 73, 75, 82–4, 94, 95, 106, 112, 119–21, 124–5, 153, 155, 156, 813–14, 188, 189, 206, 214, 216, 239, 249 ‘ulama, 49, 65, 66, 67, 81, 88, 90, 184 Umayyad dynasty, 47, 174–6, 178, 180 umma, 45, 51, 52, 57, 83, 137, 149, 150, 170, 172–80, 183, 186, 188, 193–4, 195, 197, 199 universalism, 45, 47, 48, 134–5, 170 as world society, 47, 65–9 UN, 5, 27, 41, 43, 128, 136, 163, 213 Charter, 128, 135, 200 General Assembly, 41 Security Council, 41, 213 Security Council Resolutions, 129, 135, 136 Unat, Faik Resit, 76 UNFCCC, 41, 112–13 UNHCR, 41 United Arab Emirates, 121, 128, 130, 198 United Arab Republic, 9, 120–1, 154 universalism, 32–4, 45, 47, 48, 58, 88–9, 170, 180, 183, 193, 194, 199–200, 203, 234; see also caliphate; umma US, 4, 7, 14, 34, 35, 40, 140, 141, 166, 194, 198, 206, 213 and Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 7, 101, 212, 220 and Kuwait, 7, 101, 131, 160 role in the Middle East, 4, 15, 18, 36, 95, 99, 101, 104, 105, 126, 129, 138, 162, 205, 206, 207, 211, 220, 221, 223–5, 239, 248–9 see also Iraq: Anglo-US invasion USSR, see Soviet Union Uzbek khanate, 53, 57, 79, 62 Valbjørn, Morten, 140–69, 188 Valladolid, 63 values, 17–23, 26, 28, 29, 34–8, 93, 117–19, 147, 228–9

279

Asian, 32–3 Islamic, 11, 52, 135, 199 Middle Eastern, 2, 10–13, 19, 22, 67, 79, 91, 123, 127, 132, 144, 158 thick and thin, 2, 12–13 Western/European, 10, 12, 22, 34–7, 90, 242 Westphalian, 18, 22 vanguard, 35–6, 39, 127, 237, 239 Vaughan, Dorothy M., 73 Veinstein, Gilles, 56, 57 Venezuela, 13 Venice, 56, 60, 63, 64, 69, 73, 74, 75 Vienna Conference, 76 vilayet, 80, 81 Vincent, Raymond J., 5, 17, 28 Viorst, Milton, 149 Wæver, Ole, 202, 229, 245 Wahhabism, 68, 180, 193 Walker, Julian, 84 Walker, Rob B. J., 146 Wallachia, 54 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 23, 202 Walt, Stephen, 145, 216 Waltz, Kenneth N., 35 Walzer, Michael, 2, 12 war, 27, 38–41, 46, 70, 93 global war on terrorism, 4, 104–5, 236, 248 in the Middle East, 49–50, 59, 61–4, 76, 78–9, 90, 98–9, 102, 103–5, 106, 114, 115, 156, 205, 211, 233, 236 Watson, Adam, 2, 18, 39, 71, 72, 87, 91, 240 Webster, Charles K., 76 Weller, Christopher, 31, 32, 36 Welsh, Jennifer M., 78 Wendt, Alexander, 37, 38, 209 West, 1, 10–13, 18, 22, 29, 32, 34–6, 39, 41–2, 90–1, 126–9, 136–7, 206, 211–18, 230, 238, 247–50 anti-Westernism, 192, 230, 235, 248 conflict with Islam, 4 values, 10, 12, 22, 34–7, 90, 242



Index

280 Index world systems theory, 3, 202 World Trade Organization, 27, 41, 110–11, 113

Yapp, Malcolm E., 6, 23, 81, 131 Yemen, 8, 9, 16, 20, 22, 67, 84, 94, 120, 122, 129, 143, 154, 161, 217, 218 North, 121, 130 South, 121 Yugoslavia, 35, 189 Yurdusev, A. Nuri, 70–91, 119, 134

al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 194 al-Zayani, Abu’l-Qasim, 63, 67 Zebadia, A., 59 Zhang, Yongjin, 27 Zionism, 9, 120, 149, 152, 194 Zisser, Eyal, 162 Zogby International, 197–8



Westphalian, institutions, 28, 39, 228, 231 model, 18, 21, 35, 38, 45, 46, 72, 85, 90, 134, 142, 145, 162, 205, 207, 208, 214, 218, 221–3, 229, 230, 236, 237, 238, 245 settlement, 72 values, 18, 22 Wheeler, Nicholas J., 35 Whitman, Richard, 27 Wight, Martin, 2, 17, 18, 31, 34, 71, 109, 147 Williams, John, 30 World Bank, 113–14 World Muslim Congress, 186, 188–9 world society, 24–6, 28, 30, 168, 202, 227–8, 231, 234–5 Arab, 140–2, 152–3, 156, 161, 162–4, 165, 167 Islamic, 47, 65–9, 136–7, 140–2, 149–51, 162–4, 165, 167 Middle East, 45, 91, 95, 101, 147–9, 246

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Theorising International Society: English School Methods (Palgrave Studies in International Relations)

International Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Palgrave Studies in International Relations)

The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)

Diplomatic Theory of International Relations (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)

From International to World Society?: English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)

Peacekeeping in the Middle East as an International Regime (Studies in International Relations)

Diplomacy in the Middle East: the international relations of regional and outside powers

The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (The Contemporary Middle East)

Territorial Conflicts in World Society: Modern Systems Theory, International Relations and Conflict Studies (New International Relations)

Political Realism in International Theory (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)

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Classical theory in international relations

The Environment and International Relations (Themes in International Relations)

Political Theory and International Relations

The National Interest in International Relations Theory

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Globalization and International Relations Theory

Political Theory and International Relations

International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific

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