The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  There are several key reasons for the comparatively low levels of economic globalization—and, correspondingly, regionalization—in the Middle East. Mention has already been made of the stunted growth of institutional and structural mechanisms across the Middle East that would help facilitate the expansion of modern global capitalism into the region. Chief among these would be a politically independent and transparent banking system, which economists argue is central to fostering growth and development.90 Central banks, one of whose main responsibilities is to set monetary and fiscal policy, play an especially elemental role in this regard. There are, however, literally no central banks across the Middle East that would qualify as politically independent, with the ineffectual central bank of the Palestinian National Authority, at least on paper, being an exception.91

  Other structural factors that slow the pace of globalization in the Middle East include the continued presence of the state in the national economy, despite economic liberalization moves designed to curtail the intrusiveness of state institutions, as well as the state’s own inability to create an attractive and transparent regulatory environment that would foster deeper linkages between the local and the international economies.92 Related to structural constraints on globalization are political and diplomatic ones, with a number of Middle Eastern countries either proving too unstable and inhospitable for foreign investments or being subject to stringent international economic sanctions, or both. For much of the past thirty years or so, for example, both Iran and Iraq have been either at war with each other or locked in a cold war with the West and under sanctions, the end result being their increasing isolation from the world economy. For different reasons and under different circumstances, Syria, Libya, and Sudan—as well as Algeria during its civil war in the 1990s—have also either been under international trade sanctions or otherwise been too unstable politically to meaningfully engage with the global economy.

  Equally important is the political management of the cultural dimensions of economic globalization. By revolutionizing information technology and facilitating easier access to means of communication across the globe, globalization can be just as consequential—at times, in fact, far more consequential—in the spreading and diffusion of cultural values as it is in bringing about economic linkages and interactions. As chapters 7 and 8 demonstrate, a number of states in the Middle East take very deliberate, and often guarded, postures in relation to the diffusion into their societies of norms and values from abroad, frequently viewing them as inimical to the cultural milieu that they seek to create and on which their legitimacy is built. The culturally conservative states in Iran and Saudi Arabia are two extreme examples of states fearing the cultural consequences of globalization. While perhaps not as directly frightened as state leaders in Tehran and Riyadh, most political elites elsewhere in the Middle East tend to be apprehensive about possible responses and reactions by the various groups in their societies to globalization’s cultural dimensions. It should be remembered that “Westernization” is not the only side effect of globalization. With the spread of the Internet and the rise of multiple satellite television channels beaming out of many Middle Eastern capitals, a phenomenon pioneered by Al-Jazeera, “Islamization” and the appearance of “global muftis” can be considered just as much products of globalization.93 The attempted cherry-picking by political leaders of which aspects of globalization to embrace and which ones to fend off, or how tightly to control a process that by nature does not lend itself to control, largely accounts for its uneven and halting spread across the Middle East.

  Finally, perhaps the most important factor hindering the pace and depth of economic globalization in the Middle East has to do with the different conceptions of nationalism that state elites have adopted across the region as it pertains to their political legitimacy. As chapters 3 and 4 demonstrated, nationalism remains a potent force throughout the region, and one that is frequently employed for purposes of political mobilization or legitimacy. How this nationalism is articulated and conceptualized by the political elite is key in shaping a larger national context that might prove hospitable or inimical to economic globalization. If nationalism is presented by the elite as ownership and control over national resources, and is in turn generally accepted by the public to have such a meaning, then the prospects for economic globalization, which entails investments by and interactions with foreign capital, are extremely bleak. This is the nationalism that was so loudly proclaimed by Nasser and that resonates to this day in the far corners of the Middle East. It is a nationalism at the center of which rests the notion that the nation’s resources belong to none other than the nation itself, and that consequently their development and marketing cannot be realized through reliance on foreign capital and expertise.

  If, however, nationalism is presented not so much as control over the process for developing domestic resources but rather as ownership over the outcome of such development, then the larger national context is more amenable to economic globalization. Throughout the small, politically conservative oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf, especially Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, as well as in Turkey and Israel, this is the perception of nationalism that has been articulated by the political elites and has been largely accepted by the public. In the oil monarchies, policy makers have been painfully aware of their societies’ demographic and technological limitations. Even if they wanted to, they could not possibly manage the exploitation of their vast oil resources on their own and must instead rely on Western multinational corporations to extract and export the very oil that brought them fabulous riches. With rentierism underwriting the political bargain, this emerging conception of nationalism quickly began revolving around the state’s management of the oil wealth—that is, the creation of cradle-to-grave welfare states—rather than its heroic struggle against the insidious devices of imperialism. Today, completely different conceptions of nationalism exist on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, in Iran, as compared to its southern shores, where the gleaming cities of Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai would not have existed in their current forms had it not been for the pervasive presence of multinational corporations.

  Both on a regional scale and globally, economic integration with the outside world has largely eluded the countries of the Middle East, except perhaps the handful of small states in the Arabian peninsula. Across the Middle East, regional integration has lagged because of mutual mistrust and lack of commitment and political will by state leaders to foster meaningful means of economic linkage across national borders. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of Middle Eastern economies lack the institutional capacities and expertise needed to partake in global economic activities on an equal footing with their European and Asian counterparts, thus being forced, almost by default, to be on the receiving end of globalization rather than active participants. The deep-seated skepticism of many local policy makers concerning the larger phenomenon of globalization has only reinforced its comparatively low penetration into the Middle East. Not surprisingly, then, the region lags behind on most indices of economic globalization.

  This chapter has highlighted four aspects of the political economy of the Middle East: pervasive statism; unruly rentierism; the state’s uneven control over and penetration of the different sectors of the economy; and halting and at best uneven levels of globalization. The combined consequence of these phenomena has been a political economy that has historically supported and sustained authoritarianism. Each phenomenon, in fact, has a self-perpetuating logic and has so far managed to resist serious changes or reforms. How the Arab Spring, and more importantly the sense of popular empowerment of the urban middle classes that it entailed, will challenge the political economy of authoritarianism in the Middle East remains to be seen. But so long as the basis of the political economy remains unchanged in much of the Middle East, authoritarianism remains a threat.

  Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s in Turkey and Iran, respectively, and then in the 1950s in the
rest of the region, the state in the Middle East assumed a direct role in owning and controlling, or at the very least extensively regulating, the various forces and means of production. In one shape or another, economic patronage became the preferred modus operandi of patron states across the region. The assumption was also that the state was in the best position to decide on and implement the most prudent course of economic development. But the state’s assumption of numerous developmental tasks, and its proportional growth in size in the process, masked a more fundamental institutional weakness. This weakness derived from the state’s need to consolidate its powers through incorporating the popular classes and catering to many of their demands. The state, in other words, secured its hold over power by placating the popular classes and subsequently found itself beholden to them. What ensued was an undisciplined, unruly rentierism, one that has kept the developmental potentials of the region in check.

  At the same time, a negative equilibrium of sorts developed between a state that was not quite able to implement many of its economic agendas and a society whose economically autonomous actors, in the form of the semiformal sector, are only partially able to evade the regulatory reach of the state. The state, of course, is far from irrelevant. Its orchestration of the national macroeconomy still influences the lives of all citizens, rich and poor, irrespective of the economic sector to which they belong. The noneconomic initiatives of the state—conscription, policies toward ethnic or religious minorities, state-sponsored gender equity or discrimination initiatives, and compulsory education laws, to mention only a few—can be just as profoundly consequential for the lives of the citizenry. But in terms of routine economic interactions between the state and those outside the formal sector, the prevailing pattern of relationship is one of disconnection. State control over social actors, their resources, and their activities is neither as direct nor as complete as state actors would like. Nevertheless, it is sufficient for state actors to continue holding on to power and, if they so choose, to maintain the status quo seemingly indefinitely.

  On the whole, despite crises and changes, the political economy of the Middle East has not helped society become empowered and/or autonomous in relation to the state. Even within the context of the post–Arab Spring era, we have in the Middle East states whose development potentials are curtailed by the tangled webs they themselves have woven, presiding over societies whose ability to mount autonomous action in relation to the state—whether in opposition to the state or even in its support—is severely curtailed by various bureaucratic and police institutions. But the bonds of patronage are not nearly robust enough in most countries of the region to maintain ruling bargains indefinitely, particularly in places where rentier arrangements are indirect and weak. In only a handful of Middle Eastern countries, most notably the oil monarchies on the shores of the Persian Gulf, are financial and economic resources sufficient to transfer rent incomes directly into the pockets of the citizenry (in the form of entitlements and cash handouts), and even then a large state like Saudi Arabia has not had complete success. In most other countries, rentierism manifests itself in indirect forms, as in state employment and price subsidies, and there is little that binds the population to the state in direct ways. But dependence on state-supplied paychecks, coupled with a weak private sector, has been enough to undermine the potential for autonomous action and organization on the part of social actors. As the fateful events of 2011 demonstrated, however, politically motivated mass mobilization can indeed occur, especially when cracks in the state-imposed wall of fear make social actors feel empowered and when the ruling coalition loses some of its cohesion and unity. These two ingredients—social actors’ empowerment and cracks within the ruling coalition—are rare, and their simultaneous occurrence is even less common. Whether the examples of Tunisia and Egypt can be replicated elsewhere in the region, and whether the Arab Spring’s early pioneers and other countries in the Middle East can become democratic, remains far from clear at this point.

  11Challenges Facing the Middle East

  The political history of the Middle East has been fraught with turmoil and political instability. By the middle of the twentieth century, most of the region had experienced two separate, qualitatively different periods of colonial subjugation. First came Ottoman rule, from the early to mid-1500s up until the late 1910s, and then British and French rule, beginning with the end of the First World War and lasting until the late 1940s. Not surprisingly, the state-building processes of the 1940s and 1950s—like those in Turkey in the 1920s and in Iran in the 1930s—took on an urgent and feverish character. A similar sense of urgency characterized the modernization drive of the 1960s and 1970s. Dictatorships were established, overthrown, and reestablished; wars were fought, lost, and refought; a new state was born and another died; and the wretched history of one diaspora came to an end but the misery of another got under way. The past four decades have brought more of the same, though with slightly different features and added layers of complexity.

  Not every aspect of Middle Eastern history has been cyclical. In the 1960s and 1970s, the physical character of the Middle East changed tremendously. Cities were expanded, massive monuments, roads, and factories were built, and the march toward “development” yielded some tangible results. The region’s countless monarchs—both official ones and the others who chose to label themselves “president”—could point to their countries’ economic and industrial progress with a measure of justified pride. By the late 2010s, hopeful spring swept across much of the region. Cairo’s modern-day pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, fell from power and was taken to court. Tunisia’s Ben Ali fled and took refuge in Saudi Arabia. Qaddafi, who fancied himself as the King of All Africa, was dragged out of a sewer pipe and shot. And Bashar Assad, once seemingly invincible, desperately hung on to power. The Middle East’s remaining dictators were put on notice.

  But many in the Middle East remained poor, and the fruits of industrial development were not shared evenly anywhere. More fundamentally, as the United Nations has pointed out, much of the Middle East, especially the Arab world and Iran, continues to suffer from three glaring deficits—in freedom, in women’s empowerment, and in human capabilities and knowledge relative to income.1 Nevertheless, industrial development became less of a dream and more of a reality throughout the Middle East in the twentieth century. What differed greatly was its depth compared to that in other parts of the world and the different levels to which it spread in the various parts of the region.

  Industrial development, uneven as it has been, has had several adverse side effects with which the countries of the Middle East must now contend. For the past century or so, the challenges facing the Middle East have been those of state building, military security, political consolidation, and economic development. Far from being resolved or somehow withering away, these challenges are now being compounded by the negative consequences of industrial modernization. Of these, three seem particularly pressing: astoundingly high rates of population growth; the increasing scarcity of water resources; and the pollution of various environmental resources, especially air. This chapter examines the magnitude of each of these problems and highlights the negative consequences each has had so far for the countries of the Middle East. These are the defining challenges that the Middle East must confront in the twenty-first century. Failure to resolve them could well end up being more consequential than the wars and revolutions that became such hallmarks of the past hundred years.

  POPULATION GROWTH

  With a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa, the countries of the Middle East tend to have the highest rates of population growth in the world (table 13). Overall, according to the World Bank, between 1998 and 2015 the population of the Middle East is expected to grow at an average rate of 2.0 percent annually, compared to 2.1 percent for sub-Saharan Africa, 1.2 percent for East and South Asia and the Pacific, and 1.3 percent for South America.2 Tragically, in sub-Saharan Africa, infant mortality rates are much higher than in the Mid
dle East (89 per 1,000 live births compared to 32 in the Middle East in 2007) and life expectancy much lower (fifty-one years in Africa compared to seventy in the Middle East in 2007). As a result, the slightly higher annual rates of population growth in Africa are offset by higher levels of infant mortality and shorter life spans. At current rates, the population of the Middle East is estimated to double in approximately twenty-seven years.3

  As with the rest of the developing world, population growth rates in the Middle East accelerated beginning especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when advances in medical technology and hygiene resulted in declining levels of infant mortality and longer life expectancy. In specific relation to the Middle East, two additional factors account for the region’s high rate of population growth. The first has to do with the relatively high rates of fertility among Middle Eastern women as compared to women elsewhere. In 1990, women in the Middle East on average had 4.9 children, a figure that dropped to 3.2 a decade later and to 2.7 in 2010 (table 14). By contrast, fertility rates were lower in all other regions of the developing world except sub-Saharan Africa.