The Middle East in the world hierarchy:
imperialism and resistance
Raymond Hinnebusch
School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland,
KY16 9AX, UK.
E-mail: rh10@st-andrews.ac.uk
This study deploys a structuralist framework of analysis, modified by elements
from other theories, to examine the place of the Middle East in the world hierarchy.
It surveys the origins of the regional system in imperialism’s peripheralisation
and fragmentation of the region, the core-periphery clientalist hierarchy thereby
established, regional agency within the system, including the foreign policies of
dependent and rebellious states, and the on-going struggle over the hierarchical
order between revisionist forces in the Middle East and the global hegemons.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2011) 14, 213–246.
doi:10.1057/jird.2010.3
Keywords: dependency; hegemony; hierarchy; imperialism; Middle East;
nationalism
Introduction
The Waltzian image of world politics as a timeless, uniformly anarchic states
system has been widely critiqued on the grounds that there are elements of
hierarchy within this anarchy (Hobson 2000: 30–8; Hobson and Sharman
2005). As seen from the global south, it would be more accurate to say that
there are elements of anarchy (at the regional level) within a global hierarchy
(Escude 1998). This is especially so of the Middle East, the only major high
civilisation that has not reconstituted itself as a global power in the postimperial
era (Buzan 1991). It remains, as Brown (1984) argues, the Third
World region most exceptionally penetrated and subordinated within the world
hierarchy, but also the one most stubbornly resistant to this, hence an epicentre
of instability that spills out in periodic global crises.
The notion of hierarchy in international politics is best understood through
the lens of Marxist-inspired ‘structuralism’, which is taken here to embrace
dependency theory, world systems theory and neo-Gramscianism. Although
ignored by dominant IR approaches such as realism and constructivism,
structuralism’s key concepts — imperialism, the core-periphery structure and
dependency — are essential to understanding the processes and consequences
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2011, 14, (213–246)
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www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/
of the incorporation of the Middle East into the global hierarchy. However, in
Marxist structuralism, as in its realist counterpart, the global structural level
appears over-determinant to the neglect of regional agency; therefore, just as
this has been corrected for realism, for example by Buzan and Weaver’s (2003)
regionalism and neoclassical realism’s bringing in of domestic politics (Lobell
et al. 2009), so Marxist structuralism has to be similarly ‘upgraded’ by bringing
in identity (from constructivism) and by incorporating polarity and anarchy
(from realism), variables that shape motives and opportunities for agency at
the regional level. Subsuming these variables within a structuralist framework
allows a more powerful explanation of the international politics of the Middle
East region than any of these theories can, on its own, provide. The paper will
first lay out an ‘upgraded’ structuralist framework of analysis and then use it to
organise and interpret the (chiefly but not exclusively) structuralist literature
on the region.
A structuralist paradigm for understanding hierarchy
This section sketches a structuralist approach regarding the origins of world
hierarchy, its structure and the forces of change in the system, particularly as
regards the Middle East.
The origin of hierarchy
Among the contributions of structuralism to IR theory is its explanation of
the fundamental inequalities captured in the notion of hierarchy. World
hierarchy is underlain by capitalist relations of production that determine an
unequal control of world economic surplus. The most fundamental conflicts in
world politics are about the globalisation and reproduction of these unequal
power relations (Rupert and Soloman 2006: 12–4). Western imperialism, which
established the current global hierarchy, was the product of the uneven spread
of capitalism, creating gross differences in technology and productive power as
well as exceptional appetites for resources, markets and investment outlets in
the early capitalist developers. The resulting unprecedented military imbalance
allowed Western imperialism to subjugate and plunder pre-capitalist societies
to fuel Western capital accumulation and industrialisation. World systems
theory identifies the chief agent in this: two world hegemons (first the UK,
now the US) who incorporated the periphery (including the Middle East) into
the world capitalist system, largely by military force but also by co-optation of
local elites. The outcome is a global division of labour, with technologically
advanced and capital-intensive production in the core and lower-wage, less
skilled (initially primary product) production relegated to the periphery,
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resulting in a wealth gap of historically unprecedented magnitude (Brewer
1990: 1–24, 42–56, 58–72, 161–224; Halliday 1994: 47–73; Rosenberg 1994:
91–122, 159–73).
The structure of hierarchy
The second contribution of structuralism to IR theory is its conceptualisation
of the structure of the international system as a hierarchy divided between
core and periphery. According to world systems theory, this structure is
constituted of both a hierarchic economic division of labour and an unevenly
globalised states system (Wallerstein 1979: 6). In this system, states may all
be theoretically sovereign, but their grossly uneven capacities, mirroring the
economic division of labour, translate into different specialised functions in
the world system (Donnelly 2006). Most important, the role of the global
hegemon is qualitatively different from other states: it spreads capitalism
globally by opening up pre-capitalist or national capitalist economies and
provides ‘public goods’ that guarantee the reproduction of the capitalist system
such as a sound currency, financial liquidity and contract enforcement (Cox
1996: 106–11). Since relations of subordination invite rebellion, the hegemon
also assumes a policing role in which, despite formal sovereignty, it lays down
the law to subordinate states and selectively enforces global norms. As regards
the Middle East, it ensures world access to cheap energy sources and disciplines
‘rogue states’, both of which are concentrated there, while preventing the rise
of a regional hegemon (Lustick 1997) able to organise the region (and control
its oil reserves) against the core. By contrast, the dependent states of the
Middle East periphery are likely to act as transmission belts for the export of
surplus to the core and for the inculcation of capitalist discipline in their
populations (Cox 1996: 106, 154, 193).
The world hierarchy is, of course, not a bureaucratic chain of command in
which the hegemon enjoys legitimate authority over periphery states; the latter
are in principle sovereign and free to defy its demands (just as the worker is
free not to sell his labour to the capitalist). Rather, it is the peculiar kind
of hierarchy that emerges from anarchy (insecurity in the absence of law),
namely a system of clientalism in which patron and core are in a position of
highly asymmetric interdependence. Several writers, notably Galtung in his
‘Structural Theory of Imperialism’ (1971), explain the mechanisms that
constitute this asymmetry. First, core states penetrate the periphery states by
establishing/co-opting client elites/classes that share interests with the core;
since these interests diverge from those of their own populations, costing them
legitimacy and generating rebellion, client elites require the protective support
of the hegemon. Second, periphery states are in a generally inferior bargaining
position vis-a`-vis the core. Economically, the core monopolises scarce means
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of production (capital and technology, including military technology) while the
periphery provides surplus unskilled labour and raw materials. Additionally,
the periphery regime receives from its patron rent that enables it to become a
domestic patron, clientelise and demobilise society, hence contain opposition
within; this makes it more dependent for its survival on its external patron than
on its population. Politically, periphery states are in the early stages of state
formation, often suffering from incongruity between territory and identity,
with legitimacy deficits and contested boundaries, hence facing double threats
from both within and without, and bound to seek a patron-protector (Ayoob
1998). Third, economic links are structured vertically to the core at the expense
of horizontal links among the periphery states, a fragmentation that sets them
against each other, allowing divide and rule by the core, and deterring regional
economic development. As such, client states need their patron far more than
the patron, having numerous clients, needs any individual one of them (Hey
1995).
Once implanted by military force, this system is chiefly sustained by unequal
economic power and patron–client relations, with military intervention by the
hegemon only periodically required against the minority of states that challenge it
(and which, usually isolated, can be picked off one-by-one). The two dimensions
of the system, hierarchy and anarchy, normally reinforce each other: the hierarch
(hegemon) unites the core (Volgy and Bailin’s (2003) ‘collective hegemony’), while
maintaining the anarchy in the periphery (preventing a regional hegemon) that
keeps weak states in need of a global patron. Given dependent states’ unequal
need for resources and protection, when their patron calls for political support or
imposes rules of the game, the client is obliged to respond positively.
Nevertheless, the client has some leverage over the patron. Because the
patron has no legitimate right to command sovereign states, the majority of
client states must be given a modicum of satisfaction in order for the patron
to readily discipline the recalcitrant minority. Most important, however, is that
to the extent that patrons are competing for clients, the latter may extract
benefits from a credible threat to change patrons. This is largely determined
by global polarity: thus, during the Cold War some periphery states made
the super-powers bid for their support and a few even used the patronage of
the hegemon to advance themselves into the ‘semi-periphery’ of the world
economy (becoming ‘newly industrialised nations’ — NICs), opportunities that
have largely disappeared under unipolarity. Polarity is, thus, decisive in shaping
the degree of asymmetry in the core-periphery hierarchy.
Change within hierarchy
Hierarchies are always contested and liable to change. In the neo-Gramscian
version of structuralism, actors are acknowledged to make their world but
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within structures of inequality constructed in the past, not in conditions of
their own choosing; agents have very unequal abilities to affect structures,
with hegemons possessed of vastly superior material resources. If a hierarchy
is to be reproduced over the long term, sufficient concessions must be made
to subordinates to enable its legitimisation by a hegemonic ideology (Cox
1996: 103; Laffey and Dean 2002: 90–107; Gill 2003: 15–65). Yet, driven by
the expansive appetite of capitalism, the hegemon/s have created a system
of unprecedented global inequality that enjoys only precarious consent in
the periphery (Gill 2003: 66–72). This makes periphery states ‘sites of
contestation’ since client elites lack legitimacy and are always vulnerable to
rebellion (Cox 1996: 116). Still, the fragmentation of the periphery facilitates
‘divide and rule’ by the hegemon and revisionist agents can only overcome
the resulting collective action problem if they are able to mobilise the
deprived via a shared identity/ideology. The Marxist tradition expects
proletarians to provide the shock troops of revolutionary change under the
banner of socialism, but since the decline of this ideology, there is no global
‘counter-hegemonic ideology’ (Joseph 2008). The exception is the Middle
East (Thompson 1970), which, uniquely rich in both grievances and in suprastate
counter-hegemonic identities (Arabism, Islam), has always been an
epicentre of resistance to the core, with aspirant regional hegemons
periodically trying to use supra-state identities to unite the region against
the global hierarchy (Halliday 1999: 1–26, 293–322). Opportunities for
revisionist regimes are, however, decisively shaped by polarity at the global
level: the bipolar power balance, checking the power projection of the
hegemon in the region, facilitated such challenges, while under the current
unipolar order in the region, resistance is increasingly located in trans-state
identity movements whose prospects depend on a combination of asymmetric
warfare capabilities and imperial overreach by the hegemon (Burbach and
Tarbell 2004; Rogers 2008). Finally, however, structuralism would underline
that the ability of revisionist actors to construct a durable alternative regional
order depends on breaking the core-periphery system of economic dependency,
thus allowing the construction of regional economic interdependences —
material interests — congruent with regional identity.
In what follows, this structuralist paradigm is used to interpret the origins of
hierarchy in the Middle East, its structure, agency within it and the ongoing
contestation over it.
Imperialism and the remaking of the Middle East
A necessarily abbreviated overview of the remaking of the Middle East by
Western imperialism is given here, drawing on the main themes in structuralist
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narratives and examining the origins of hierarchy, the mechanisms by which it
is enforced and their debilitating consequences for the region.
Origins of hierarchy in the Middle East
The incorporation of the Middle East as a periphery of the core, in which it
became an exporter of primary products and an importer of manufactured
goods and technology, is well documented by writers on the region (Amin
1978; Owen 1981; Issawi 1982; Bromley 1994). By the 1700s, the Ottoman
Empire was in decline as the East–West trade routes on which its civilisation
was built were lost to the West (Rosenberg 1994: 94–107). Western military
encroachment became constant, beginning with Russian advances on its
northern frontiers. Unequal treaties were imposed on the Ottomans and on
Iran by the European powers through force and bribery of venal elites,
allowing them to flood unprotected local markets with foreign manufactured
imports. This precipitated indigenous industrial decline and unemployment,
a shift of Middle East exports to raw materials, and a decline in the terms of
trade. In Egypt, military defeat led to imposed tariff reductions ending
Muhammad Ali’s (1805–1848) industrialisation effort (Ayubi 1995: 87, 99)
while under a successor, Ismail (1863–1870), Egypt became a plantation for
Europe’s textile industry. In the Ottoman domains, capitulations allowed
foreign or foreign-protected minority merchants, exempted from local taxes
and laws, to displace indigenous Muslim merchants, and they exported rather
than reinvesting their profits in the region (Owen 1981: 3–9, 92; Issawi 1982:
138–55; Yapp 1987: 1–35; Bromley 1994: 46–85; Sayf 2004; Bridge and Bullen
2005: 188–92). Later came the export of Western capital to the region, first in
loans to governments, then in investments in the infrastructure that tied the
regional economy to the core (Adelson 1995). The Suez Canal, built by
Egyptian labour and financed in good part by Egyptian funds, ended up in the
possession of Europeans.
Regional efforts at ‘defensive modernisation’, beginning with the Ottoman
Tanzimat (1839–1876), ultimately undermined economic autonomy. Ottoman
reformers failed in part because, given their inability to tax the foreign-protected
bourgeoisie, the costs of financing modernisation through high-interest foreign
loans led to debt and Western control over public finances (1881). This funnelled
tax collections into debt repayment to foreign creditors, a heavy drain on the
economic base and investment capacity of the empire (Owen 1981: 57–8; Adelson
1995: 27–53); thus, 80 per cent of Syrian tax revenues went to Istanbul where at
least a half of the budget was used for foreign debt service (Amin 1978;
Fieldhouse 2006: 8–9). Similarly, in Egypt, peasants were squeezed to pay the
debt to European financiers (Sutcliffe 2002) and when this sparked popular
revolt, British occupation followed (1882).
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As the region was incorporated into the new international division of labour,
a ‘peripheral, dependent type of capitalism [whose logic] emanated not from
domestic forces y but from the metropole’ was established. It consolidated
‘old [agrarian] modes of production and the classes that corresponded to
them’ (Ayubi 1995: 92, 96): starting under the Ottoman land law of 1858 but
consolidated under European rule, urban notables and tribal chiefs acquired
private ownership of common land, turning into a large landed class, while
formerly independent peasants were reduced to tenancy. Pre-capitalist relations
of production — share-cropping on latifundia — required minimal investment
and enabled the cheap reproduction of the labour force while incorporating
it into the export market. A backward agrarian capitalism came to dominate
regional social structures, retarding development. Yet more damaging were
those cases — Palestine, Algeria and Libya — in which settler colonists drove
indigenous peoples off their land.
In British-ruled Egypt, where incorporation into the world market went
furthest, trade and banking were captured by foreign and minority entrepreneurs,
a comprador class of import-exporters (Owen 1981: 290–2). The colonial power
discouraged industrialisation and the landed oligarchy reinvested little of the
surplus and exported much of it. The brief spurt of industrialisation in the
region during World War II (WWII) was only possible because of the rupture of
trade with the core economies. Everywhere the colonies were taxed to support
their occupation, while public education and health were underfunded.
In Iran, Iraq and the Gulf, the prize was the exploitation of local oil
reserves, the region’s main potential source of capital, by Western firms to
fuel industrialisation and military power in the West (Amin 1978). The 1914
conversion of the British navy to oil was a watershed in making the Middle
East a permanent magnet for Western penetration (Halliday 2005: 263).
Oil concessions were obtained in Iran partly owing to debt (1901) and, in
Iraq, through World War I (WWI) conquest (Adelson 1995: 183). In the Gulf
in the late 1800s, the British used gunboat diplomacy and co-optation to
establish monopolistic treaty relations with a series of petty principalities,
resulting in the concentration of many of the soon-discovered oil reserves in
small low-population mini-states ruled by client regimes inevitably dependent
on the West (Bromley 1991: 108; 1994: 108–12).
The economic peripherialisation of the Middle East was paralleled by
European political-military occupation and the parcelling out of virtually the
whole region, beginning with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and
crowned by the post-WWI division among the victorious powers of the
remaining domains of the Ottoman Empire. In this century-long process,
regional actors were not simply passive, and from the outset local actors
tried to attract external support in their local rivalries, beginning with the
Ottoman plea for Western support against Muhammad Ali’s invasion of Syria
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(1840–1841) and early 20th century Hejazi and Saudi use of British support
against the Ottomans (Brown 1984). However, while particular local actors
achieved some advantage over rivals, the resulting increased external penetration
meant a long-term loss of regional autonomy. Faced with superior military
force, more and more local actors chose accommodation with imperial
powers, for example the Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq after WWI. At the
same time, elites were widely co-opted as imperial powers accorded them the
lion’s share of the national wealth — oil or land — as their private patrimony,
giving them a stake in the imperial system. Minorities and tribes were regularly
co-opted and armed, thereby alienating them from the majority and making
them dependent on the imperial powers; the latter also relied on levies from
older colonised regions (Senegalese or Indians) to subdue the Middle East —
divide and rule on a global scale. Empire could not have been imposed without
collaborators (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Robinson 1972), for Britain
and France wanted it on the cheap (Adelson 1995: 190–7) and where elites
refused to collaborate the outcome could be different: thus, when the
nationalist-fired remnants of the Ottoman armies under Mustafa Kemal made
the potential cost of conquest too high, plans to carve up Anatolia had to be
abandoned as the post-WWI British economy fell into crisis (Fromkin 1989:
427–34, 540–57). Across the region, periodic uprisings still had to be countered
by artillery and air bombardment of cities, villages and tribes. It took 90,000
troops and 10,000 lives to suppress the Iraqi revolt of 1920, and 325,000 troops
to suppress the Rif revolt in Morocco (Fromkin 1989: 449–54; Khalidi 2004:
1–36). Since nationalist resistance kept reviving, military force was repeatedly
used to smash it or to reverse progress toward independence, including the
1941 deposing of Rashid Ali Gaylani in Iraq and of Reza Shah in Iran, the
1945 massacre at Setif in Algeria and the 1946 bombardment of Damascus.
The structure of hierarchy in the Middle East: fragmentation and dependence
By the end of a century of Western conquest, an indigenous universal empire
had been replaced by a profoundly flawed Western-dominated states system
that fragmented the region and would perpetuate its subordination long after
formal independence. Most of the new states were inevitably weak (Halliday
2002). This was partly because many were small, such as the microstates of the
Gulf, or because arbitrary boundary drawing, reflective of the interests and
compromises of the imperial powers and in defiance of indigenous wishes,
often issued in artificial states that could not command the identifications
of their populations. The Arab state with the most significant material power
assets, Iraq, was crippled by the most severe identity fragmentation as Kurds
were thrown together with Sunni and Shia Arabs. The creation of new client
elites in artificial states also resulted in legitimacy deficits that deterred the
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democratisation that might have focused loyalty on the state. The most
obvious exception and one of the few relatively strong states in the region
was Turkey, where Ataturk, in fighting off imperialism, was able to secure
borders for an independent state compatible with the idea of a Turkish nation
and with enough legitimacy to eventually democratise.
Arbitrary boundary drawing also built conflict into the very fabric of the
states system, with border conflicts integral to the most durable centres of war,
notably between Israel and its neighbours. The creation of larger poorer states
side by side with what would become fabulously rich mini-states also built
power imbalances into the system; thus, the creation of Kuwait so as to block
Iraq’s access to the Gulf also meant drawing a line around oil wells and
creating an artificially privileged population bound to excite the envy of its
stronger neighbour. Irredentism was built into the regional system as arbitrary
boundaries frustrated identities, notably Arab nationalism, where the single
putative Arab nation was divided into many states, and Kurdistan, where an
emergent nation was divided among four regional states. This was the very
stuff of divide and rule by the core.
The flaws of the states system and economic peripherialisation reinforced
each other (Halliday 2002). The borders of the states system shattered what
had been a region-wide economy established under the Ottomans, which
could otherwise have formed the basis of post-independence economic
recovery, as happened in China and India where the pre-capitalist empires
were preserved. On the contrary, the concentration of much of the oil wealth
in tiny client states with no potential to be ‘newly industrialised states’
(NICs) meant that those countries exported capital surpluses to the West
while larger states with the land and labour potential for diversified
economies lacked capital (Alnasrawi 1991: 55–66, 191–3). Insecurity deterred
regional investment and, over time, spurred the rise of national security
states that, by the 1970s, dissipated revenues on arms purchases, obstructing
the emergence of developmental states. However, without breaking out
of economic dependency and launching national industrialisation, local
states lacked the economic base of national power needed for real political
independence and security.
The entrenchment of two vital and permanent Western interests in the
region — oil and Israel — made it a magnet of continual post-colonial external
intervention. Western powers did everything they could to prevent the region
from taking command of its oil resources, beginning with the 1953 overthrow
of Iran’s Mossadeq and continuing with two wars (1990, 2003) against Iraq
(Alnasrawi 1991: 18, 74, 198–206). The creation of Israel was a global anomaly:
a colonial settler state established in the heart of the region at the expense of
indigenous people was bound to be rejected, making its survival dependent on
the West. Yet its unmatched network of strategic depth in the West made it
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the dominant regional military power, allowing it to extend its colonisation
at the expense of the Palestinians, who, a state-less people, became an intense
source of irredentism, and to occupy the territory of neighbouring states,
locking it into conflicts with them as well. Washington’s support for this
inflamed the region against the US, which, as a result, came to see Israeli
military prowess as a ‘strategic asset’ defending its interests. Israel’s neighbours
became dependent either on the USSR for the arms to balance it or on the US
as the only power able to restrain it and broker a peace settlement.
Despite formal independence after WWII, the core, therefore, continued
to penetrate the region. Once direct European colonialism was dismantled,
the Western hegemons attempted to organise a post-imperial treaty system,
including the region-wide Baghdad Pact (1955), and later the Eisenhower
Doctrine (1957), in order to preserve their military bases and influence.
Many regional states, locked into intense security dilemmas with their
neighbours, but unable to rely on themselves for defence, needed external
patrons, either for direct protection and/or for arms supplies. In the period
(1955–1990) when Western treaties and bases came to be seen as illegitimate
in the Arab world, the hegemon relied instead on regional rivalries to build
informal alliances, exploiting the cleavages between conservative monarchies
and radical republics and between the non-Arab and Arab states (with the
US having security ties with Israel, Turkey and Pahlavi Iran in the informal
‘periphery pact’ against the radicalising Arab core of the region). Saudi
Arabia and Iran became the twin pillars of US security in the Gulf until the
Islamic revolution (1978). This ‘vacuum’ was then filled after the first Iraq
war (1990–1991) when in formal Western protectorates were re-established
over the Arab Gulf and after the second Iraq war (2003) when a US treaty
was imposed on Iraq itself. Parallel to alliance formation, sustaining Western
hegemony over the region required military intervention on a regular basis:
there were 11 military operations in 1956–1973 alone, despite bipolarity,
and the US engaged in 17 military operations in the Middle East from
1985–1995. The Middle East experienced more interventions than any other
region from 1946–1988 (Pearson and Baumann 1993–94).
Finally, the dependence of the Middle East on the core was sustained by the
lack of a regional security community. The fragmentation of the regional economy
retarded the complex interdependence that underlies security communities
elsewhere. But equally important was the world hegemons’ ability to prevent
the ‘organisation of the region’ by a regional hegemon against the core.
According to Lustick (1997), there are no Middle East great powers because
no indigenous actor is allowed to expand by challenging artificial boundaries
in the name of Pan-Arab empire or Islamic revolution. Indeed, interventions
by the core powers to smash potential regional hegemons bracket the history
of the modern Middle East, beginning with the great powers’ defeat of
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Muhammad Ali’s attempted Egyptian empire (1840–1841) and repeated
against Saddam’s Iraq 150 years later. As such, the region lacks a core state
that, as Huntington (1998: 174–9) argues, would be pivotal to the establishment
of an autonomous region. Thus, global hierarchy and regional anarchy
each reinforces the other.
Agency in the Middle East periphery
What are the consequences of the incorporation of the Middle East into the
core-periphery system for the foreign policies of regional states? Arguably the
effect is two-fold: both dependency and rebellion. This section examines, first,
how far dependent states have agency and, second, why a few rebel but most
acquiesce in their dependency.
Crippled agents: the foreign policy of the ‘dependent state’
Because Westphalian sovereignty has its own independent logic at odds with
clientalist hierarchy, even dependent states seek to defend their autonomy
and security. What makes them different, however, is that they are more
likely to sacrifice the first to the second; they pursue their own interests, but
conceive them in a very narrow way — regime survival through the resources
or protection of the patron. It is not that dependent regimes simply follow
orders from their patron, since there is always some room for bargaining
built into the structure of clientalism. But it is part of the deal that, when
called upon, the client supports its patron, whatever regional interests must
be sacrificed.
The interests sacrificed to keep core patronage are those that IR theory
expects states to pursue when they enjoy ‘normal’ autonomy. Realism would
expect the larger Middle Eastern states to seek regional hegemony and to
balance against external intervention. While there is evidence of this, what is
striking is its regular failure (Lustick 1997). For constructivists, states’ identities
shape their foreign policies (Barnett 1998; Telhami and Barnett 2002) and,
given the counter-hegemonic identities — Arabism and Islam — that dominate
the region, reflected in pervasive anti-imperialist public sentiment, the Arab
states ought to group together against the ‘other’ — notably Israel and the
hegemon. Yet, currently most Middle East states actually contain rather than
express the dominant identities of their mass publics. Arab elites are widely
seen as caught between the demands of the hegemon and domestic expectations
that a proper Arab or Islamic foreign policy would defend regional autonomy
and causes such as Palestine. At best they try to balance between these contrary
demands, but the increasingly intrusive hegemon is making this ever more
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difficult: a landmark was the Iraq war of 2003, when publics were uniformly
against the war while every single Arab state except Syria acquiesced in it, some
even allowing their territory to be used to prosecute it. Their dependent
position in the international system clearly overrides the identity of their
populations in shaping their policies. What is striking about Middle East states
is that, inconsistent with realism and constructivism but perfectly compatible
with structuralism, their modal behaviour is bandwagoning with the core.
What explains this ‘unnatural’ behaviour? For Moon (1995) a ‘constrained
consensus’ between core and periphery elites issues from similar (Western)
education, common economic interests and shared perceptions of threat from
radical counter-elites. This fits the profile of many Middle Eastern state elites;
thus, Alnasrawi (1991: 102–6) argues that the Arab oil producers export their
capital to the West in part because their bankers and finance ministers learned
their neo-liberal economics there. Rosenau’s (1969) concept of a ‘penetrated
state’, in which powerful foreigners participate through intensive face-to-face
interactions in a weaker state’s political process, is certainly so of the Middle
East. There the US ambassador may act — as his British counterpart once used
to do — as a virtual proconsul, enjoying direct privileged access to rulers who
themselves regularly visit Washington. In particular, those that are directly
dependent on their yearly US subsidy, for example Egypt’s president and
Jordan’s king, must demonstrate to the US Congress both their loyalty to
America and their benevolence toward Israel. In such venues, these leaders are
subjected to influence from powerful foreign patrons that is more immediately
compelling than the expectations of their own populaces.
At another level, Moon (1995) observes that the more a state is imposed
from the outside, rather than an organic internal product, as is common in
the Middle East, the more national interest as an explanation of foreign policy
is problematic. Stephen David (1991) argues that in fragmented societies elites
pursue not a national interest but a regime interest often at odds with the
former. The main threat is not other states but internal opposition; hence, the
state’s foreign policy is designed to cope with it by omni-balancing, that is,
aligning with a more remote, hence less threatening core power in order to get
the resources/protection to deal with the greater threat from within. Harknett
and VanDerBerg (1997) qualify this by observing that in the Middle East
opposition to regimes often takes a trans-state form, with internal and regional
external threats interlinked. Although David believes he is adapting realism
to the states of the periphery, in fact ‘omni-balancing’ presupposes the
incorporation of periphery states into a clientalist hierarchy.
Finally, in low legitimacy states, security has a powerful economic side, since
keeping the masses acquiescent and supporters loyal depends on delivery of
economic benefits. Because such a high proportion of economic resources in
Middle East states derives from external sources, either hydrocarbon rents or
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strategic aid, rather than internal taxation, foreign policy is inevitably more
responsive to external powers and markets than to indigenous expectations.
Escude (1998) believes that periphery states so depend on access to economic
resources to which the hegemon is gatekeeper that few of them, apart from
a handful of rebels, want to pay the economic cost of defying the hegemon.
If, in a realist world, the Arab states would align together to balance Israel,
the economic dependency of Egypt and Jordan on the US prevents this, leaving
the relatively economically independent Syria as a sole balancer: dependency
for the former states overrides both identity and security.
In summary, incentives for dependent states are structured by hierarchy such
that what would otherwise be the driving forces of foreign policy — regional
ambitions or indigenous identity — must often be sacrificed, constrained or
repressed in deference to core patrons.
Revisionist vs status quo: explaining variations among periphery states
Built into hierarchic structures are, however, incentives to revolt as well as submit.
The Middle East features both some of the world’s most dependent states, small
buffer or city states that are naturally status quo and prone to bandwagoning with
the core, such as Jordan and Kuwait, and also a disproportionate number of
the global minority of revisionist (‘rogue’ in Washington parlance) states — Libya,
Iran, Iraq and Syria — that challenge external constraints. The weakness of
regional states may incentivise ‘omni-balancing’ but some states have opted for
‘reverse omni-balancing’, appeasing internal opinion through anti-imperialist
policies. Weak states may require a patron, but during the Cold War some took
the risks of breaking with their former colonial masters and seeking protection
with the emergent revisionist Soviet superpower, while others saw it as a threat.
Clearly, the systemic hierarchy does not wholly determine precisely how states
respond to it. So what determines whether a state challenges the systemic order or
is content with its subordinate place in that order?
Social forces, state formation and foreign policy tangents
To understand this, structuralists examine the balance of social forces within
the state and particularly the social composition of the ruling elite, with
privileged groups expected to be satisfied with the status quo position of their
state in the global hierarchy and dissatisfied elements to emerge from more
plebeian strata. However, the struggle of social forces is itself shaped by state
formation paths and the main initial differentiation in pathways in the Middle
East was between regimes originating in imposition or co-optation from
without (with satisfied groups dominant) and those arising out of revolution
against this (bringing plebeian strata to power). Whether revolution takes
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place is, in turn, intimately related to the extent of damage done by
imperialism: where the struggle for independence was especially prolonged
(Egypt), or where identity was frustrated by imperial boundary drawing (Syria)
or economic resources (land, oil) appropriated by foreigners (Algeria), revolutions
were more likely. Such differential state formation paths built revisionist
or status quo foreign policy tangents into regimes that shaped differential
responses to similar strategic situations.
A cursory comparison of Syria and Jordan exposes the importance of
initially different state formation paths for foreign policy (Hinnebusch and
Quilliam 2006). Both states were carved out of historic Syria (bilad ash-sham),
their populations had similar Arab-Islamic identities and both were vulnerable
to more powerful states; as such, they would be expected by constructivist
and realist theories to behave similarly. Yet the contrary origins of their ruling
regimes and the social forces incorporated into them shaped quite different
foreign policies. Jordan was literally created by British boundary drawing for
its Hashemite clients (1923) in a territory meant to serve as a buffer between
Palestine under Zionist colonisation and the wider Arab-Islamic world. The
incapacity of this impoverished society to support a state, hence the regime’s
extreme dependency on Western subsidies, made the Hashemites autonomous
of domestic opinion and responsive to Western expectations in the conduct of
foreign policy. Even in the era of Pan-Arabism, when elected nationalist
politicians demanded a break with the West, a royal coup (1957) backed by
tribal units of the army turned back the nationalist tide. The state was
consolidated by the disproportionate recruitment of pre-nationalist Bedouin
tribes into the army and the relative marginalisation of the nationalist-minded
urban middle class and later the Palestinian majority. The regime’s identity,
that of a moderate buffer state, largely contained rather than expressed the
identity of the state’s majority population. Its foreign policy was naturally
status quo bandwagoning with the West.
If the Jordanian regime was the beneficiary of the break-up of historic
bilad as-sham, Syria was the victim, generating a deep-seated revisionism and
Pan-Arab identification in its political culture. While Jordan’s monarchy
survived the Arab nationalist era, Syria’s nationalist middle class infiltrated
the army and mobilised the peasantry in overthrowing the old oligarchy (1963);
the resulting Ba’thist regime disproportionately incorporated plebeian social
forces with a revisionist nationalist orientation. Being threatened rather than
protected by the West, the Ba’th was more dependent for survival on domestic
legitimacy from a nationalist foreign policy; having a more diversified economy
and more diversified external dependencies, including dense links with the
East Bloc during the Cold War, Syria was enabled to defy the West as Jordan
could not. Hence, the Syrian regime’s Arab nationalist identity tended to
express rather than repress popular identity in its foreign policy, which has
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mixed radical revisionism and a more realist policy of balancing against
(Western/Israeli) threats.
These contrary origins put Syria and Jordan on enduring divergent tangents
and on opposite sides of the periodic conflicts in the region. While Syria was
the target of Western-sponsored subversion in the 1950s, Jordan’s monarchy
was propped up by British intervention (1958) against Arab nationalist
subversion. In the 1960s, Syria sponsored Palestinian militancy, while in 1970
Jordan’s monarchy decisively repressed it and benefited from Israeli and US
threats against Syria’s attempt to intervene on the Palestinians’ behalf (during
‘Black September’). In the 1980s, King Hussein pursued peace diplomacy with
Israel that excluded Syria, which did everything possible to upset such a
settlement. In the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war, King Hussein supported Iraq’s
effort to blunt Iran’s export of Islamic revolution in the Arab world, while
Syria aligned with revolutionary Iran and helped it foster Hizbollah in
Lebanon.
Foreign policy tangents are not, of course, fixed indefinitely. Indeed,
systemic pressures may reinforce or dilute a regime’s original tangent; however,
it takes a change in the social composition of elites to transform it. When
dissatisfied plebeian elites seize power, foreign policy can be rapidly and
durably transformed, as happened when revolutions turned Iraq (1958) and
Iran (1979) from pillars into challengers of the Western-dominated regional
order. But change can also happen incrementally; hence the embourgeoisement
of initially radical elites tends to give them an increasing stake in the status quo
over time, as happened in Egypt and Algeria, leading to foreign policy
accommodation with the West.
The political economy roots of foreign policy
Underlying state formation and foreign policy tangents are deeper political
economy factors. Marxist analysis expects periphery states to promote a transition
to capitalism. The main issue is whether they can pursue national capitalist
roads able to break out of the periphery and compatible with foreign policy
autonomy, or whether the requisites of capitalist development push
convergence, via integration into the world capitalist economy, toward foreign
policy bandwagoning with the core. Ayubi (1995) sees the Middle East state
as a function of ‘articulated modes of production’, hybrid formations typical
of the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes, which allow for
considerable variation in how far regimes extend or constrain foreign capitalist
penetration and, hence, variation in their foreign policy tangents.
One typical pathway was the rentier monarchy in which external patronage
and oil revenues consolidated the rule of pre-capitalist tribal fractions around
city-states or desert emirates. Ismail (1993) showed that Kuwait’s formation
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resulted from Britain’s severing it from Iranian and Ottoman trade networks
(1899), its natural economic hinterland; since development in Kuwait would
only make sense in such a regional context, the proceeds of oil were either
expended on imports, marginalising local productive forces, or invested abroad
in the productivity of the core, with the dominant classes transformed into
compradors — middlemen — with the capitalist world. Their interests attached
to the core and their survival dependent on its security guarantees against
neighbouring nationalist states, bandwagoning is the natural foreign policy
behaviour of such regimes, although they attempt to disguise it from their
populations.
In non-oil settled societies, the early independence period (1945–1954) was
one of agrarian capitalist export economies under landed oligarchies,
corresponding to a dependent form of foreign policy. The subsequent rise of
radical military republics (1952–1970) reflected a stage when the landed
oligarchy had lost national leadership but an industrial bourgeoisie had yet
to emerge, leaving a leadership gap filled by military officers and intellectuals
of petit bourgeois origin. Consolidating power through populist alliances
with parts of the working and peasant classes and through ‘overdevelopment’
of the bureaucratic and military arms of the state, these ‘Bonapartist’ regimes
(after Marx’s (1991) analysis of Napoleon III) carried out ‘passive’ (Cox 1996:
128–30, referring to Gramsci) ‘revolutions from above’ (Trimberger 1978).
Their balancing between domestic class forces was seen to correspond to
external balancing between the superpowers during the Cold War.
Aware that an autonomous foreign policy was impossible without some
measure of economic independence, such regimes all tried to dilute the dependency
established under previous client oligarchies, notably through land reform
and nationalisations of foreign trade. Through state-led import substitution
industrialisation (ISI) they sought to break out of the economic peripheralisation
suffered by primary product exporters. This option was made possible by
Soviet aid and markets and/or by nationalising oil resources controlled by
Western companies. Particularly where nationalist states assumed control
of their own oil resources — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Algeria — they were able to
sustain a nationalist foreign policy for some time.
But overcoming dependency is no easy thing, especially where such resources
are lacking. In the Egyptian case, once the statist national economy
reached a dead-end (1966–1970), a reviving Egyptian bourgeoisie sought
reintegration into the world capitalist market, and once President Sadat
found it would win him their support plus American aid and diplomatic
help with Israel, he transformed Egypt’s foreign policy (1974–1980) from
a bulwark of anti-imperialism under Nasser to the gateway by which American
influence came back into the Middle East. Under Sadat’s successor, Mubarak
(1980–2011), Egypt’s dependence on US economic aid locked it into a
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pro-American foreign policy at the expense of its Pan-Arab leadership and its
autonomy; for example, dependence on the US forced Egypt to give way on
making the renewal of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty membership
contingent on Israel’s accession to the treaty. In short, transformations in the
foreign policies of states correlated with changes in their economic position in
the core-periphery system.
By the 1980s, all the Arab republics increasingly moved toward reintegration
into the world market. Suffering from failures of capital accumulation,
the exhaustion of import substitute industrialization (ISI), fiscal crisis, debt
and the end of Soviet aid, they needed to revitalise private and foreign
investment. They all embraced economic liberalisation and partial privatisation
of state industry while the local bourgeoisie entered partnerships with
transnational corporations (TNCs) and often exported capital through new
local branches of Western banks, thereby restoring much of the old
dependency. The social base of the state was transformed as a new alliance
of the bureaucracy with foreign and private capitalists excluded popular forces.
Authoritarian power was now used to enforce investor-friendly measures
demanded by international financial institutions against the working public
(e.g. reversing food subsidies, labour rights and land reform, etc.) and to
protect new inequalities amidst growing class conflict and nativist reaction
(from political Islam) to Western cultural invasion. The state was turned from
a buffer against the world economy into Cox’s (1996: 154) ‘transmission belt’.
Despite the rise of a new rich, no regional state (except perhaps Turkey) looked
poised to break into the semi-periphery of ‘newly industrialised states’ (NICs).
This had inevitable foreign policy consequences. Both economic integration
into the world capitalist market and growing domestic legitimacy deficits
pressured all states toward ‘omni-balancing’ or bandwagoning with the West.
This could be delayed by special factors — oil wealth, a nationally mobilised
public, the institutionalisation of statist/populist interests, Western sanctions —
as in Iraq, Iran and Syria. Indeed, it took full-scale US invasion to put an
end to nationalist defiance in the former; but the material base of a nationalist
foreign policy is precarious enough in the latter two states that it is, ironically,
mostly American hostility that deters their reintegration into the world
capitalist system.
The struggle over hierarchy
Having rebellion built into it, the core-periphery hierarchy is a focus of on-going
contestation, and nowhere more than in the Middle East, where revisionist
states periodically attempt to overturn or at least restructure it (while pulling
themselves into the semi-periphery), and the world hegemons and their agents
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seek to sustain it. In every decade of the first half century of formal ‘independence’
in the region (1950–2000), major challenges to the region’s subordinate
position in the core-periphery structure have been mounted: Nasserist
Pan-Arabism from the 1950s, the Palestine Liberation Movement from the
1960s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the
1970s, Iran’s Islamic revolution in the 1980s, Saddam’s Iraq in the 1990s,
the Bin Laden phenomenon in the 2000s. What is equally striking, however, is
the regular defeat of these efforts: agents, whether movements or states,
wielding ideas, however powerful, cannot prevail without overcoming material
structural constraints. Explaining these struggles and their outcomes illustrates
the power of structuralist analysis.
Two failed bids for regional autonomy
The rise and decline of Pan-Arabism
The Pan-Arab movement launched by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser after
the 1952 revolution, in concert with kindred trans-state movements in the
other Arab states, aimed to roll back Western dominance in the region and
create a relatively autonomous Arab system with Cairo at its centre. This
struggle was conducted through a battle for public opinion over the
Western-proposed Baghdad Pact (1954–1958) between Egypt, which saw it
as neo-imperialism, and pro-Western Iraq. Nasser’s Pan-Arab message
mobilised the emerging new middle classes across the region, putting the
narrow-based pro-Western oligarchies on the defensive. His survival of the
1956 Suez war, by which Britain and France sought to reverse his gains,
followed by the 1958 revolution in pro-Western Iraq consolidated a Pan-Arab
regime in the region whose norms delegitimised Western treaties and bases and
dictated support for the Palestine cause and Arab unity (Gerges 1994: 21–40;
Barnett 1998: 100–95).
Pan-Arabism depended, however, on a specific power balance, namely
a temporary coincidence during the decade 1956–1967 of bipolarity at
the global level (disunity in the core) combined with regional Egyptian
hegemony overcoming anarchy at the regional level. As regards the global
level, Nasserism was made possible by the patronage that the Soviet Union
provided for nationalist states seeking to disengage from the West and by
its countervailing power that checked the unrestrained projection of
Western military capability into the region; without bipolarity, the Suez
invasion would have overthrown Nasser just as earlier challengers like
Iraq’s Rashid Ali had been removed (Gerges 1994: 22–30, 67). The
importance of bipolarity was immediately evident once it ended: without
a Soviet check on its power, the US hegemon rapidly defeated Saddam
Hussein’s 1991 bid to make Iraq the Prussia of the Arab world.
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At the regional level, Pan-Arabism depended on Egypt’s temporary interArab
hegemony that kept the Arab states relatively united against imperialism.
However, to endure, a regional ‘hegemon’ must enjoy both superior material
resources and a legitimating ideology having universalistic appeal. Nasser’s
hegemonic power was essentially normative — his ability to mobilise the Arab
street against rival regimes that defied his definition of the all-Arab interest —
but it was still rooted in Egypt’s material power as the largest Arab state with
the biggest population, army and economy. Egypt could not sustain its
ideological hegemony when the material balance shifted against it: its 1967
defeat by Israel shattered its army and enervated its economy while the
growing wealth of the Gulf petro-monarchies soon made Cairo dependent on
them (Telhami 1990: 96–7; Noble 1991: 65). In short, the brief autonomy of the
regional system under Pan-Arabism was a function of temporary anomalies
in the structure of the core-periphery system: disunity in the core and unity in
the periphery.
At a deeper level, the global material hierarchy obstructed Pan-Arabism.
Because the core-periphery economic structure remained intact, Pan-Arab
identity lacked an underlying economic/material base. In Samir Amin’s narrative
(1978), the region-wide trade interdependence fostered under the Middle East’s
historic empires (and associated with universalistic Arab-Islamic identities),
had been shattered by the West’s post-Ottoman fragmentation of the regional
market into state-bounded economies exporting primary products to the ‘core’.
This pulled the economic interests of dominant classes (exporting landlords,
petro-shaikhs) out of correspondence with Arabism even as it was emerging as
a dominant post-Ottoman mass identity. Ironically, the later efforts of Arab
nationalist states to break their economic dependence on the West only issued in
protected inward-looking economies and demolished the rudimentary Pan-Arab
industrial bourgeoisie that might have developed a stake in regional markets.
No more than 9 per cent of Arab foreign trade was with other Arab states in the
1950s–1960s. Thus, Pan-Arabism’s ideological superstructure, corresponding to
no Pan-Arab economy, lacked a material infrastructure (Alnasrawi 1991: 163).
The incongruence between norms and material structure deepened in the 1970s
as revenues from the oil boom consolidated separate rentier or semi-rentier states
relatively autonomous of their publics and more immune to the influence of
trans-state Pan-Arabism, while differentiating the material interests of the Arabs
into rich and poor states.
The failure of OPEC
The 1970s through the 1990s saw a struggle increasingly centred on control
of oil between the world hegemon and regional forces. A major watershed in
this was the creation of the OPEC, a second attempt to restructure the
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core-periphery relation. Because of a sharp tightening of the oil market (plus
a bipolar world order), OPEC was able to engineer price rises and nationalisations
of oil reserves that forced a big transfer of wealth to the Middle East.
Through the oil embargo during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Arabs, led
by Saudi Arabia, were also able to force the US to try to broker a resolution of
the Arab-Israeli conflict, which had come to politicise the Arab-Western oil
relation. For a while it was thought that political influence would follow riches,
that Arab oil would mean Arab power.
Two classic structuralist studies by Alnasrawi (1991) and Bromley (1991:
124–62) explain why this did not happen: oil, like other primary commodities,
only deepened dependency. It did not translate into Arab power because
instead of petrodollars being invested in regional development, they were
‘recycled’ — invested in Western real estate, banks, massive arms purchases,
imports and contracts brokered by middlemen, creating powerful interests
linking the Arab oil producers to the core and detaching them from the Arab
world: over 90 per cent of Arab foreign investment was funnelled outside
the Arab world. The relation between the US and Saudi Arabia, the swing
producer on the international oil market with a unique capacity to affect oil
prices, actually deepened after the oil boom: enormously rich, but also
strategically weak because it eschewed the creation of a citizen army for fear
of a nationalist coup, the al-Saud recycled its surpluses through US banks
and treasury deposits and in the massive purchase of expensive American arms
in return for US protection against regional enemies. The 1973 oil embargo,
rather than bringing the US to pressure Israel into a comprehensive evacuation
of the occupied territories, ultimately led Washington to broker a separate
Egyptian-Israeli peace (1980) that tilted the power balance in Israel’s favour
and which Saudi Arabia rejected by ending aid to Egypt. Under Reagan,
America’s pro-Israeli policies actually hardened. Yet Saudi Arabia, partly out
of fear of revolutionary Iran, continued in the 1980s to pump such large
amounts of oil at American behest that world oil prices collapsed, to the
detriment of all of OPEC. Oil was by no means exempt from the boom and
bust, typical of primary product commodity prices. And if Saudi Arabia had
appeared briefly to be an emerging second Arab hegemon, it had been quickly
captured by the global hegemon.
Across the Arab world, dependence on oil revenues — instead of taxes and
investment — had fuelled a decade (1975–1985) of massive imports and
overconsumption; but when oil prices collapsed in 1986, the result was debt
and capital drain to the core, making the region vulnerable to structural
adjustments and the conditionality terms of the World Bank and IMF
(Alnasrawi 1991: 175–7, 184). Meanwhile, the 1979 Iranian revolution and the
Iran–Iraq war sharply increased the insecurity and dependence of the Arab
Gulf states on American protection. Through creeping naval intervention in
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the Gulf during the Iran–Iraq war (reflagging Kuwaiti tankers in 1987), the US
hegemon established a role in preserving oil supplies for Europe and Japan
and protecting its local clients. At the end of the Iran–Iraq war, the Arab
Gulf states continued over-pumping oil in return for American protection,
deepening Iraq’s post-war debt problems and leading to the invasion of
Kuwait.
Re-invigoration of hierarchy: oil, US hegemony and the Iraq wars
In a bipolar world, structural limits on the power of the US hegemon made
the Western core’s management of the Middle East difficult, but the end of
the Cold War represented a new opportunity for it to reinvigorate global
hierarchy in the region. This section surveys the voluminous structuralist
literature on the Iraq wars, showing their origins in and consequences for
the struggle over hierarchy.
The US drive for undisputed hegemony over the Middle East was mounted
in two wars against Iraq, a potential regional hegemon. These wars, according
to Klare (2003) and Rupert and Soloman (2006: 120), were ultimately down
to the ‘driving thirst for the petroleum concentrated beneath areas of the
world in which Muslims predominate y’ . Indeed, control of oil is central to
US global hegemony (Bromley 1991; Bina 1993; Kubursi and Mansur 1993).
Oil is the pivotal strategic commodity, crucial to military power and to the
main industries — autos, aircraft, fertilisers, petro-chemicals — of the energyintensive
world capitalist economy. Readily monopolised, it generates huge
superprofits (30 per cent is normal) for US companies, which have funded the
most powerful American political forces (grouped in the Republican Party).
Before WWII, Washington sought control of Middle East oil resources by
extracting shares from British firms in Iraq, Iran and Kuwait while monopolising
Saudi oil fields. During the Cold War, oil became the object of joint
strategic planning by government and oil companies, and every US national
security doctrine — Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Bush II — has focused
on perceived threats to Western control of Middle East oil from the Soviet
Union or local nationalism (Halliday 2005: 97–100).
The US used its control of Middle East oil to ensure cheap energy supplies
for globalised world capitalism, reflective of the global reach of its TNCs,
the interdependence of the world market and the emergence of a trans-state
capitalist class (Van der Pijl 1998). This buttressed the credibility of Washington’s
claim to a global hegemony essential to the world capitalist economy, but
it also gave the US structural power over other capitalist states that the US
used to advance its competitive advantage (Burbach and Tarbell 2004: 58–60;
Halliday 2005: 138–43; Petras and Veltmeyer 2005: 127–59; Stokes 2005). The
US used the 1973 oil crisis to reassert its financial hegemony vis-a`-vis other
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capitalist economies by suborning Saudi elites to recycle their surpluses into
US treasury bonds and to keep selling oil in dollars despite its dramatic drop
in value, while soliciting massive Saudi and Iranian purchases of US weapons
(Spiro 1999). The need to buy oil in dollars requires all states to earn them
through access to the US market on Washington’s terms and impels its
competitors to invest dollar surpluses in US treasury bonds. The consequent
influx of dollars, allowing the US to ignore financial constraints on its imperial
ambitions and enabling US capital investment at lower costs, amounts to a
virtual tax on America’s economic competitors (Cox 1996: 287–92; Hudson
2003).
What complicates US control of oil, however, is its support for Israel’s
ambition to incorporate the ‘Occupied Territories’, which, in alienating Middle
East opinion, politicises the oil relation and jeopardises alliances with client
states such as Saudi Arabia. Balancing between Israel and the Arab oil states
requires that the US appear to seek a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict —
even as it funds the creeping Israeli colonisation of remaining Palestinian
territory that obstructs such a resolution (Schwenninger 2003). This periodically
inspires efforts by Arab nationalists to use oil as a weapon against the
West. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was in part a manifestation of this
dynamic.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion was rooted in the structural liabilities built
into Iraq’s creation by imperialism. His formula for holding a fragmented
artificial state together included a hard authoritarianism legitimised by oilfunded
development and an Arab nationalist ideology that required action
on behalf of Arab causes. Iraq’s immediate vulnerability in 1990 was the debt
accumulated in the war with Iran, exacerbated by low oil prices brought on
by over-pumping in Kuwait and the UAE, which Saddam saw as economic
warfare. Arab nationalist ideology viewed Kuwait as an artificial state carved
out of Iraq’s territory and denying it strategic access to the Gulf. Ideology also
shaped Saddam’s ambition, in the wake of his apparent victory over Iran, to
become a new Nasser. Setting out to revive Arab nationalism, he demanded
that the Arab states not allow foreign bases and that the oil monarchies share
their wealth with poorer Arab states. Warning of the shift in the power balance
against the Arabs resulting from the decline of the Soviet Union and Soviet
Jewish emigration to Israel, he threatened to use non-conventional weapons
against Israel should it attack an Arab state and proposed to use oil as
a weapon to force a change in Washington’s pro-Israel policy (Mufti 1996:
98–167, 194–230; Hinnebusch 2003: 205–12).
Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was meant both to solve his financial problems
and to give potential material muscle to his Pan-Arab ideological challenge.
Were Iraq to have retained Kuwaiti oil fields and remained in a position to
intimidate Saudi Arabia, it could nullify Saudi Arabia’s role as pro-Western
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swing oil producer and give Saddam hegemony over 40 per cent of world oil
reserves — at a time when American reserves had shrunk from 34 to 7 per cent
of the global total. Iraq would still have had to sell its oil, and its dire need for
revenue dictated that, in the short term, it would pump oil at levels likely to
keep prices moderate. But unlike Saudi Arabia, which, by virtue of its security
dependence on the US and investments in the Western economy, could be
depended upon to moderate prices and recycle oil earnings through Western
banks and through the purchase of Western arms, Iraq was not similarly
dependent and was threatening to make its oil policy conditional on a
favourable Western policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Were Iraq able to
dictate the terms on which the West received oil, it would trap US politicians
between the demands of the Israeli lobby and US consumers’ appetite for
cheap gasoline (Hinnebusch 2003).
There is no doubt that Washington welcomed a war with Iraq. Saddam’s
invasion was a threat to its interests and allies, including Israel and proWestern
Arab regimes and a violation of the Westphalian order with its
artificial borders. But it was also an opportunity for the US to establish direct
hegemony over the region and its oil that, from the time of OPEC and the
nationalisation of Western oil companies, had to be exercised more indirectly,
through client states. Because the invasion coincided with the USSR’s
withdrawal from global competition with the US, the risk of a superpower
confrontation that would hitherto have restrained US intervention on such
a massive scale was removed. War was also a chance to destroy Iraq as a
regional power: Iraq was the prime example of what the Pentagon had
identified as the main remaining post-Cold War opposition to US hegemony,
Third World nationalist regimes. Saddam’s offer of withdrawal from Kuwait
in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories exposed US
double standards and it was believed that any sign of US weakness toward
him would encourage challenges to US interests across the region. Even were
Saddam to retreat from Kuwait, if his forces remained intact, he would be
a threat needing constant containment and in a position to revive Arab
nationalism; hence, Washington brushed aside Saddam’s readiness to withdraw
on the eve of the ground campaign. A low cost military victory through
the unrestrained use of America’s high-tech military power against Iraq would
warn other challengers that, as Bush put it, what we say goes, banish the
Vietnam syndrome that had constrained US involvement in conflicts abroad
and justify a new post-Cold War mission for the US military-industrial
complex. The US had long sought extensive military bases in the Gulf but had
been rebuffed by regimes reluctant to violate the norms of Arab nationalism:
Saddam’s threat could be used to sweep aside their qualms. Finally, war was an
opportunity to demonstrate the dependence of America’s economic competitors
on its hegemonic role in securing oil supplies and ensure that Gulf
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petrodollars would continue to be primarily recycled through US institutions
and serve US competitiveness; so successful was this that the US got its
economic competitors (Germany, Japan) and clients (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) to
fund the war (Kubursi and Mansur 1993; Aarts 1994; Klare 1991; Hinnebusch
2003: 215–8; Kubursi 2006).
The war appeared to establish a Pax Americana in the Middle East. Iraq’s
destruction as a military power and its subsequent economic debilitation
under sanctions eliminated its threat to oil, while the blow suffered by Arab
nationalism allowed the norm against treaties and bases to be swept aside as
the Gulf was made a virtual Western protectorate. America’s unprecedented
military presence in the Gulf allowed it to put the two major nationalist
powers, Iraq and Iran, under ‘dual containment’ while the US-Saudi alliance
was greatly strengthened. The potential to legitimise this massive US presence
by successful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared promising as
Secretary Baker told the Israelis to ‘give up the dream of greater Israel’. US
brokerage of the Madrid peace process made Washington appear indispensable
to peace in the region and all regional states started bandwagoning with it.
Yet, Pax Americana ultimately failed and a mere decade later, the hegemon
again went to war against Iraq.
The root cause of this failure was that America’s neo-imperial presence in
the region could not be legitimised and instead sparked a radicalised Islamic
resistance. The Middle East was both the most Western-penetrated periphery
region yet also the most ideologically resistant since in Islam it had a credible
counter-hegemonic ideology (Cox 1996: 311; Halliday 2002; Gill 2003: 115).
But in a period when unipolarity had reduced nearly all Middle East states to
clients of the hegemon, resistance took the form of sub-state terrorism, the
weapon of the weak: the most international terrorist incidents issued from
the most penetrated region. Two aspects of US policy were particularly
responsible for delegitimising its presence in the region. First, the breakdown
of the peace process, clear by 2000, amidst continued Israeli colonisation of
the Palestinian territories, drove an increasing wedge between the US and the
Arabs who had been promised a peace settlement for their support of the US
in the 1990 Gulf War; indeed, the George Bush Jr. administration eschewed
a peace process that could only succeed by pressuring Israel to reverse its
colonisation of occupied Palestinian lands. Second was the US use of its
presence in Saudi Arabia to launch repeated attacks on Iraq and the neargenocidal
sanctions by which it hoped to inflict so much punishment on the
Iraqi people that they would revolt against Saddam; sanctions, however,
only made people more dependent on his regime for daily survival and
outraged Arab opinion. This combination of factors precipitated the
9/11 attack of al-Qaida against what it saw as an assault on Islam by a
‘Zionist-Crusader alliance occupying Jerusalem and the land of the two holy
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236
mosques’ and starkly exposed the vulnerability of the US to terrorism from
the Middle East.
The 2003 war on Iraq was the product of the hawkish coalition that George
Bush’s election brought to power, the Israeli-aligned neo-cons and the oil/arms
men around Vice President Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld. They saw
9/11 as an opportunity to mobilise support for a war they had long advocated
as the key to reasserting US global hegemony. The Middle East was the
location both of world oil reserves essential to this hegemony and of the main
resistance to it, and war on Iraq was seen as the key to control of the Middle
East (Petras and Veltmeyer 2005: 186–204; Hinnebusch 2007: 220).
US oil import dependence was rising in an ever-tighter oil market with global
production seemingly peaking, threatening to shift the balance of power to
oil producers and making the world economy vulnerable to an oil shock
(Campbell 1997; Morse and Jaffe 2001: 4). Iraq, with the world’s secondlargest
oil reserves and with very low production costs, was a solution to
this. As long as Saddam was in power, though, Iraqi oil remained off the
market — unless the US were to lift the sanctions and risk that Saddam would
again try to use oil for political advantage (Almond 2003; Klare 2003; Duffield
2005). What made action urgent was the breakdown of the Pax Americana
established after the first (1990–1991) Iraq war (Kubursi 2006: 254–6). Iraq
and Iran were gradually escaping from ‘dual containment’: the Iraq sanctions
were being challenged in the Arab world and Saddam was selling future oil
concessions to Russia, China and France; Western Europe was keen to engage
Iran rather than isolate it; and while US sanctions on Iran, retained at the
insistence of the Israeli lobby, excluded US companies from its oil fields, US
rivals were penetrating them. The US was also dissatisfied with the constraints
on its policy from its dependence on the Saudis, who started refusing to allow
it to attack Iraq from bases in the kingdom (Rogers 2008: 36–41) and were
intimating that their moderation of oil prices was contingent on a US
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The participation of Saudi citizens in the
9/11 attacks and in funding al-Qaida gave the neo-cons the opportunity to
demonise the kingdom. Feeling that the US ignored its interests, Saudi Arabia
sought to ease its total US security dependence by rapprochement with Iran
and Iraq. US hegemony in the Middle East rested on its unique ability to
balance special relationships with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, but its tilt
toward the former was alienating the latter. In conquering Iraq, the US would
acquire a new compliant swing producer, reducing its dependence on the
Saudis, and give the US privileged access to Iraqi oil at the expense of its
economic competitors and its emerging global rival, China (Royle 2002). The
US wanted to establish the right to attack countries it deemed threats and
Iraq, both weak and easily demonised, was an exemplary case to establish the
precedent. America’s unmatched military power would be unleashed to deliver
Raymond Hinnebusch
The Middle East in the world hierarchy
237
the ‘shock and awe’ expected to bring the submission of the region. The US
hawks were encouraged by the cost-free 2002 invasion of Afghanistan that had
allowed the US to establish military bases astride the pipelines and oil fields of
Central Asia and in Russia’s backyard. An easy victory in Iraq followed by
images of Iraqis welcoming US troops as liberators would demoralise Arab/
Islamic opposition to US hegemony (Lynch 2003). Iraq would become an
alternative site for US military bases to operate without constraint, intimidate
remaining resistance from nationalist states like Syria and Iran and hence allow
imposition of a pro-Israeli peace settlement. The imposition of a liberal order
in Iraq would vanquish the region’s counter-hegemonic ideologies (Hinnebusch
2007: 221–3; Rogers 2008: 1–3).
The war would also serve particular interests of the ruling coalition
(Hinnebusch 2007: 223–4). Conflict in the Middle East was known to lead to
higher oil prices, especially needed for high-cost Texas producers, to high oil
company profits and to renewed arms spending and sales; the direct US
ownership of oil, curtailed by the rise of OPEC, could be restored by the
privatisation of Iraqi oil (Bichler and Nitzan 2004; Burbach and Tarbell 2004:
155–7). The reconstruction of Iraq would mean very good pickings for security,
construction and oil subcontracting companies, such as Halliburton, associated
with the Bush inner circle (Pringle 2005). The neo-cons believed war would
advance Israel’s policy of colonisation in the Occupied Territories. Since this
obstructed a peace settlement and endangered the Arab relations on which oil
access depended, their nightmare was that the US would subordinate Israel’s
ambitions to appeasement of the Arab oil producers (as Bush Sr. had briefly
attempted). The seizure of Iraq’s oil fields would allow access to Arab oil
without Arab alliances and remove remaining constraints on US commitment
to Israeli interests (Lind 2002; Beinin 2003; Toenjes 2003; Bamford 2004;
Burbach and Tarbell 2004: 96–100; Pieterse 2004: 17–29; Packer 2005; Petras
and Veltmeyer 2005: 33–4, 81–2, 191–5).
The Iraq war has profound implications for conceptualising world hierarchy.
It undermines the view of the US as a reluctant empire dutifully defending world
order (Ferguson 2004) or as head of a new kind of ‘empire’ based on economic
globalisation rather than conquest of territory (Hardt and Negri 2000). Iraq
suggests that globalisation and coercive empire go together (Pieterse 2004; Stokes
2005), that war is still an instrument for seizing valuable territories, dragging
periphery states into the world capitalist system and putting in place durable
mechanisms for the exploitation of their resources (Robinson 1972; Klare 2002,
2003; Howe 2003; Hinnebusch 2006b; Pieterse 2004: 31–60; Petras and Veltmeyer
2005: 1–51; Falk 2004). US empire is a global network of client regimes and
military bases (Johnson 2004) and Iraq has been forcibly incorporated into it.
Yet, the Middle East could still be the site where US hegemony founders.
In invading Iraq, the US squandered enormous ‘soft power’, seen in the
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238
sharp decline of America’s image in world opinion, jeopardising neoGramscian
hegemony (Brzezinski 2003; Pieterse 2004: 26) and the unity of
the collective core whose backing the US needs in order to dominate the
periphery (Volgy and Bailin 2003). The US also shows symptoms of imperial
overreach (Burbach and Tarbell 2004). Washington imagined an easy hightech
war (Pieterse 2004: 85–105), but it badly overstretched the US military
(Finlan 2006). The US seeks empire on the cheap but spending on Iraq,
comparable to that on the Vietnam war, is having a similarly destabilising
effect on the world financial system (Arrighi and Silver 2001; Pieterse 2004:
4; Seabrooke 2004: 41; Beeson and Higgott 2005). The ultimate test will be
whether the US can turn Iraq and Afghanistan into client states or whether
they will be exemplars of its ‘empire of chaos’ — of its ability to overthrow
regimes but not to reconstruct the resulting failed states (Todd 2003). It is
likely that US military dominance in the Middle East will remain
unlegitimised, generating blowback and chronic war (Betts 2002; Barber
2003; Jervis 2003; Mann 2003; Johnson 2004). Each episode of American
involvement in the Middle East spreads hostility wider: what began over
Israel/Palestine in the Arab heartland spread next to Iran, thereafter to
Afghanistan and Pakistan and, with the Iraq war, to the wider Muslim world
and the Muslim Diaspora in the West. The single most potent generator of
‘terrorism’ is foreign occupation (Munson 2006: 238–41): now, to the
occupation of Palestine is added that of Afghanistan and Iraq, which,
according to former CIA anti-terrorist expert Michael Scheuer (2004), is
‘completing the radicalization of the Islamic world’. As Rupert and Soloman
(2006: 122) put it: ‘By pursuing an aggressive, neo-imperial policy in the
Middle East, the US y politically strengthens Islamist radicals and courts
tragedy of world-historical magnitude’. The high costs of empire will not
necessarily constrain Washington, however; as Petras and Veltmeyer (2005:
70–87) argue, it is ordinary people that pay the cost while the US ruling class,
reaping enormous benefits, has every incentive to persist. The US generates
the conditions of periodic Middle East crises that inflict damage globally and
which it then uses to justify its ever deeper intervention in the region. Thus,
a declining hegemon turns malign, delivering not public goods but global
losses (Hinnebusch 2006a).
Conclusion: the Middle East experience through structuralist lens
This article has tried to demonstrate the indispensable contribution of the
structuralist paradigm of world hierarchy to understanding the Middle East,
albeit ‘upgraded’ through incorporation from rival traditions of the variables
of anarchy, polarity and identity.
Raymond Hinnebusch
The Middle East in the world hierarchy
239
First, structuralism exposes the origins of the regional system by making
the concept of imperialism, so marginalised in other theories, pivotal. Uneven
capitalist development allowed imperialism to overrun the region, creating a
fragmented, economically peripherialised system of weak states suffering from
identity deficits. Imperialism established a powerful Western surrogate, Israel,
in the region and secured the region’s oil resources through client regimes.
In the process, it relegated a once-great civilisation to the bottom of the global
hierarchy.
Second, structuralism sensitises us to the roots of the ongoing instability
in the Middle East. This current order, imposed against indigenous resistance,
through coercion and co-optation and in violation of regional identity, lacks
(neo-Gramscian) hegemony in the region, hence is subject to regular challenge
by counter-hegemonic movements. The pervasive conflict in the regional
system is not, thus, the outcome of anarchy per se, as realism would argue, but
the particularly flawed version of anarchy imposed by imperialism, together
with the region’s incorporation into a global hierarchy. Constructivism stresses
the power of identity in the region but it takes structuralism to appreciate how
its frustration by externally imposed material hierarchies gives it a revisionist
content. Extraordinary external penetration together with the enduring power
of regional supra/trans-state identity (Arabism, Islam) has proved to be a
highly explosive combination, driving the periodic mobilisation of grievances
and the rise of revisionist movements and states that challenge the core.
Third, while structuralism is often criticised for a determinism that neglects
local agency, when upgraded, it strikes a better balance between structure
and agency than its rivals do, while at the same time, a structuralist framework
also upgrades the utility of their concepts. Thus, structuralism avoids the
exaggerated voluntarism of constructivism in showing that the regional system
is less the product of ‘what [local] states make of it’ or of their intersubjective
understandings than an outcome of the superior material power of imperialism
and (often failed) resistance to it. Incorporated into structuralism, realist
insights acquire new explanatory power: thus the idea of anarchy alerts us to
the pervasive insecurity in the region, but it takes structuralism to show how
this is used to enforce a clientalist hierarchy. The realist variable of polarity
sensitises us to variations in core-periphery structure, specifically, how a
combination of global bipolarity and regional unipolarity opened temporary
opportunities for revisionist movements and states in the era of Pan-Arabism.
If constructivism exposes how revisionist actors used identity to overcome
the collective action problem and mobilise resistance to the core, structuralist
analysis of material hierarchy indicates why this ultimately failed to transform
the core-periphery system.
Fourth, upgraded structuralism better enables us to understand the foreign
policy behaviour of regional states. Thus, realists and constructivists arriving
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240
from Mars would expect the Arab states to collectively balance, on security and
identity grounds, respectively, against the shared threats from the West and
Israel; that they instead bandwagon with the core is understandable within the
context of a clientele system, a peculiar form of hierarchy that thrives amidst
anarchy, and while the omni-balancing variant of realism suggests why
periphery states bandwagon, it presupposes without acknowledging this global
hierarchy.
Finally, structuralism best allows us to understand, as other theories cannot,
that imperialism, manifested in the invasion of Iraq, is not an aberration
but, rather, an apparently enduring outcome of global capitalism. The invasion
exposes the persistence of military conquest, resource wars and the attempted
constitution of client states, only a decade after such phenomena were declared
to be obsolete both by ‘end of history’ liberalism (Fukayama 1992) and
constructivist-like accounts of a coercion-free empire of globalisation (Hardt
and Negri 2000).
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About the Author
Raymond Hinnebusch is Professor of International Relations and Middle East
Studies and Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of
St. Andrews. He teaches Middle East politics, the IR of the Middle East and
the political economy of the region. His current research interests include a
Raymond Hinnebusch
The Middle East in the world hierarchy
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project on Syrian-Turkish relations, a book on IR Theory and the Middle East,
and a project on the political economy of reform in Syria. His books include
The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences, co-edited with Rick Fawn (Lynne
Rienner Press, 2006); The International Politics of the Middle East (Manchester
University Press, 2003); The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, edited with
A. Ehteshami (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 2002); Syria, Revolution
from Above (Routledge, 2000); Authoritarian Power in Ba’thist Syria: Army,
Party and Peasant (Westview Press, 1990); Peasant and Bureaucracy in Ba‘thist
Syria: The Political Economy of Rural Development (Westview Press, 1989);
Egyptian Politics Under Sadat (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Journal of International Relations and Development
Volume 14, Number 2, 2011
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