The area-studies legacy

Approaching the Middle East as a single cultural – and, by extension, ‘national’ – region onto which a states system has been artificially imposed resonates with both the modernisation paradigm in political science and the Orientalist tradition in Middle East Studies. The transition from empires to nation-states in the interwar and post-World War II periods was decisive in steering academia toward the analysis of the state as the primary and essential unit of human organisation. Each new state to emerge from empires was seen to contain characteristics distinctive to itself, but amenable to scientific analysis using universal tools. While content changed, form remained rigidly constant: ‘Each geographical unit was imagined, in turn, to possess an economy …; a self-contained political system or state; an homogenous body called society; and even a distinctive national culture’.Footnote ¹⁶ Those involved in social science disciplines could specialise in discrete parts of each nation-state (its economy, sociology, political system, culture), but the study of broader cultural areas was something for which only students of ‘area studies’ were seen to be competent. Soon after the Second World War the newly founded Middle East Journal announced that an understanding of any one country in the Middle East could be advanced ‘only through a proper knowledge of all’, and this because of the shared Islamic heritage and experience of European colonialism. The ‘imaginary geographies’ exposed by Edward Said,Footnote ¹⁷ inscribed and reinscribed by generations of Orientalists, were thus carried over into area studies as scholars ‘brought from oriental studies the idea that the Islamic world formed a cultural unity, based on a common cultural core that only the Orientalist was equipped to decipher’.Footnote ¹⁸

Just as relativism in the social sciences went hand in hand with the flowering of nationalism in the colonies, the area studies contention that world regions – defined culturally and constituted historically – were more ‘real’ than the new states that emerged as a result of decolonisation was bolstered by the rise of popular Pan-Arabist political movements and the apparently unstoppable momentum of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952.Footnote ¹⁹ By the late 1950s, the formation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) between Egypt and Syria, revolution in Iraq and Arab nationalist revolt in Lebanon encouraged the formalisation of a regionalist, and culturalist view of Middle East politics and its transfer into IR.Footnote ²⁰ For Leonard Binder in 1958 ‘… the most important characteristic setting apart the Middle East as a subordinate international system is the ideological context of its politics, both domestic and external’. In this ‘year of revolution’, Binder confidently affirmed that:

The cultural context of the Middle Eastern subordinate system, for Binder, explained the volatile nature of its politics. In terms that would become commonplace, he argued that the instability of the Middle East resulted from ‘the usual incongruity of nation and territorial state’. Binder extrapolated from this a range of other special features of Middle East politics: the instability of alliances with extra-regional powers; the ‘ease with which domestic politics may affect affairs in neighbouring countries’; ‘the greater ease in maintaining the status quo than in changing it’; and the ‘near equality of the role of each Middle Eastern state within the subordinate system’. More ominously, Binder also saw that ‘these factors add up to an inherent instability of system, suggesting further that, should external vigilance be relaxed or a domestic (and therefore inaccessible) upheaval take place, violent changes will occur throughout the area’.Footnote ²²

Binder's regional approach was pioneering. Although proceeding from the assumption that the states were ‘inherently unstable’ and artificial, he recognised that new states did exist and that they were conducting relations with each other. Rather than approaching the Middle East in ‘wheel and spoke’ terms as the relations of individual peoples (Arabs, Turks) and polities (the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, the Palestine Mandate) to great powers,Footnote ²³or ignoring the states and focusing only on broad cultural commonalities, Binder prioritised the internal dynamics of a subsystem of states conditioned by history and shared culture to act in distinctive ways. Subsequent studies like Malcolm Kerr's The Arab Cold War laid much of the empirical groundwork for the regionalist level of analysis. Kerr accepted, albeit reluctantly, a conception of Arabism as an untheorised independent variable:

If Kerr reserved judgement on Arabism's provenance, other scholars sought historical explanations for regional identity. In L. Carl Brown's work, political or diplomatic culture embodies the distinctiveness of the region.Footnote ²⁵ Brown echoes Binder's convictions about the superficiality of the states system grafted onto the Middle East. He defines the Middle East as the Afro-Asian lands of the former Ottoman Empire, in order to show the lasting influence of the Ottoman heritage, and to root the region's specificity in its history. This results in a tautology wherein the Ottoman influence ‘gives the region an identity established not in terms of outsiders’ interests but by an indigenous standard, that of having shared for centuries a common political bond’. It is this identity that undergirds his delineation of the Middle East as a unit of analysis and ‘system’. The exclusion of non-Ottoman lands (Iran) or non-Middle Eastern states with an Ottoman heritage that would allow him to test ‘the relative importance of the Ottoman legacy’ is testimony to the a priori nature of this assumption.Footnote ²⁶

Brown elaborates his main thesis, that the outside penetration of the Middle East since the early nineteenth century has fostered a political culture peculiar to the region, with reference to the seven ‘rules of the game’ of Middle Eastern politics.Footnote ²⁷Although he does not make the distinction himself, the rules can be organised into structural and agential characteristics, highly suggestive of the later constructivist norms-identity division. Structural rules include a series of interlocking (kaleidoscopic) alliances, great power interest in the region for reasons of rivalry rather than rationality, and a tendency toward ‘homeostasis’ – defined as the inability of any one power to impose its will over the others. Other rules relate to the predispositions of agents within the system and are highly reminiscent of the Orientalist essentialism lambasted by Edward Said: the proclivity for the ‘quick grab’, the disinclination to break issues down into manageable chunks, the preference for reactive politics, the preference for using outside mediators as guarantors, the concentration on tactics instead of strategy and the mentality of zero-sum games. These characteristics, though not unique to the region individually, ‘combine to make the Middle East in modern times a distinctive politico-diplomatic system’.Footnote ²⁸ The uniqueness of this combination of characteristics, however, is purely hypothetical and not convincingly linked either to the Ottoman heritage or to other causal factors. The articulators or creators of the Middle Eastern political culture are not introduced; the relationship between the agential and structural ‘rules’ not elaborated. While the views of Western statesmen since the nineteenth century on the nature of the Middle East are examined to show the longevity of ‘Eastern question’ dynamics, views of Middle Easterners themselves are not explored.Footnote ²⁹

Brown's discussion of a ‘pattern of politics’ or ‘system of political interaction’ surviving in the Middle East since Ottoman times anticipated the constructivist reading of international politics in general: a common epistemology shared by all members of the system defines and configures what politics will, or will appear to, be. Under the neorealist paradigm, power had been understood in material terms, with the ‘balance’ of power constituting the underlying dynamic of international relations. Constructivists and others questioned this as the Cold War came to an end. Many followed the tradition of Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, to see power partially or even primarily in an actor's ability to enforce or otherwise induce others to adopt particular interpretations of the world.Footnote ³⁰ Ideas, norms, perceptions, and identity came, for many, to more clearly reflect the complexities and ambiguities of a post-bipolar world, perhaps especially in the Middle East.

Although constructivists are generally at pains to distance themselves from the rationalism of mainstream IR, their view of power as the ability to shape worldviews was far from being marginal to the discipline. Most prominently, Joseph Nye's idea of ‘soft power’, first articulated in 1990, was premised on the assumption that actors, once persuaded to adopt American values as their own, will cease to pose threats to American hegemony, and focussed on ideas, norms, and identity.Footnote ³¹ As with Samuel Huntington's oft-cited intervention on the ‘clash of civilisations’, the concept of soft power was further elaborated in relation to the Middle East, and in particular Middle Eastern ideas as opposed, and as explicit threats, to states:

Such mainstream interest in ideas, particularly Middle Eastern ones, after the Cold War helped to create a receptive environment for constructivist scholarship and an appetite for Middle Eastern case studies. The Middle East has been put forward as an invaluable ‘laboratory’ for IR, and constructivism touted as a way to ‘bridge the gap’ between the discipline and Middle East area studies.Footnote ³³ But such interdisciplinary enthusiasm reflects, and encourages, tautological assumptions such as the following:

And:

To assert the absence of ‘national-states’ not only accepts that bounded nations exist elsewhere, but also downplays or ignores the integrative effects of state-based nationalist movements in the region while uncritically accepting the assertion that the Arab people constitute a nation.Footnote ³⁶ For Barnett, and others that have sought to use constructivism as an alternative to realism, the mediator between Arabism as a set of constraining or enabling regional norms and Arab ‘national’ identity remains the Arab state as unitary actor. But the nature of this mediation is not theorised. As such, scholars should not accord Arabism, Islam or Middle Eastern diplomatic culture ‘exceptional power’ over state conduct and from there conclude that constructivism is ‘particularly relevant’. Kerr's ‘mystery’ of Arab desires for unity remains unsolved.

The influence of modernisation theory

Discussions of states in the Middle East have frequently stressed their artificiality, illegitimacy and lack of ‘fit’ with society. Often formal state structures are approached as modern grafts which Arab societies, belonging to a separate premodern sphere governed by other values and norms, instinctively reject. This clearly resonates with the modernisation paradigm, which posits the progressive universalisation of Western economic, political and cultural patterns, in particular the nation-state format. Analyses that give centre stage to Arabism as a normative framework emerging from Arab identity imply that this ‘internal’ variable, if not more significant in conditioning regional politics than the ‘external’ factor of modern Westphalian norms, at least qualifies and disrupts the ‘normal’ interactions of these states.Footnote ³⁷ The progressive normative evolution from Arabism to sovereignty in the Arab World seems at least implicitly to be attributed to the success of modernisation in the region: as the incongruity between state and nation recedes, politics become more ‘normal’.

Since the first major application of modernisation theory to the Middle East,Footnote ³⁸ studies in this tradition have sought to uncover and explain obstacles to modernisation (or democratisation), with some variant of ‘culture’ often topping the list. The classic example remains Michael Hudson's Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy.Footnote ³⁹ The Weberian concept of legitimacy here hinges on the relationship between state and nation:

The ‘legitimacy crisis’ that states of the Middle East face stems from the fact that the modernisation ‘package’ has disrupted but not replaced ‘traditional political relationships’ in the Arab world.Footnote ⁴¹ Legitimacy can thus be created only by reversing modernisation (unthinkable under the paradigm) or through the trickle-down of modern norms into society, at the expense of ‘traditional’ identities and patterns of behaviour.

Modernisation theory, whose problematic reification of both the ‘traditional’ and the modern was convincingly exposed some time ago,Footnote ⁴² continues to colour work on the role of ideas in foreign policy, with the dichotomy of modern norms ‘outside’ and traditional identities ‘inside’ clearly maintained. John Ruggie, for example, has argued that ‘fundamental modernist concepts such as market rationality, sovereignty, and personal privacy would not have been comprehensible before the development of appropriate terms of social discourse’, and that ‘neither human rights nor sovereignty nor Stalinism would have made any sense in those pre-modern societies in which people's lives were governed by notions of magic or fate’.Footnote ⁴³ Again, it is society that is premodern while the state is modern: ‘For traditionalist or religious fundamentalist societies even today’, Keohane and Goldstein surmise, ‘the individualistic and secular scientific premises of [the modern] world-view remain intellectually and morally alien’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In other areas of IR and Foreign Policy Analysis, the parallel distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, or premodern, modern or postmodern states is made to reveal the variable integration between state and society, phase of state-formation, or the extent of a regime's legitimacy in the eyes of a population.Footnote ⁴⁵

Advocates of the concept argue that legitimacy is what ultimately allows the state to monopolise the rightful use of violence and is a quality bestowed upon the state, or the government, by ‘society’.Footnote ⁴⁶ State leaderships must seek to project ideas that accord with societal values in order to earn or retain legitimacy. Thus, according to one example, the Egyptian president Sadat used Islamic symbols in order to appear more legitimate: ‘Sadat attempted to bolster Egypt's Islamic identity for political reasons, only to discover that religious groups violently opposed his version of that identity’.Footnote ⁴⁷ If, the logic follows, Sadat had got the identity ‘right’, he may not have had to pay the ultimate price. A key component of this dichotomous view, rooted in modernisation theory, is thus the uncomplicated conceptual distinction between state and society, and the reification of each. To return to Hudson:

Were one to elaborate further on the Sadat example, one would conclude that if Sadat had chosen the correct identity, then his visit to Jerusalem and the subsequent peace treaty with Israel may have been unpopular but would not have delegitimised the leadership itself. This reading overstates the leadership's power to select identities at will, understates the diversity of societal interests and perspectives at stake, and is silent on how state and society relate to one another both ideationally and structurally. It is difficult to imagine which identity Sadat could have chosen that would have rendered his foreign policy moves acceptable to those that eventually carried out, or supported, his murder.

This critique should not be read as implying that no differentiation between state and society is possible or denying that leaders make choices with reference to, and seek to engage with, a concept of national identity. But when studying issues of normative change, and their relevance to international behaviour, ‘society’ as a concept must be unpacked to foreground the resonance ideas have with more specific societal groupings. Further, the relationship between groups and the state leadership should be understood as a dynamic process.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Dialogues model

Much of the literature on the role of identity and ideas in the Middle East fails to explore the role of the domestic environment in mediating the interplay between norms (coming from outside via the state) and identity (emanating from society). In Dialogues, for example, Barnett stresses that the normative framework of Arabism emerges from Arab identity: from a cultural ‘toolkit’ or ‘storehouse’, but beyond imprecise references to shared language and heritage does not demonstrate from where this cultural reservoir comes, or how it is mediated by the state to inform frameworks of regional order. This is striking given that on the one hand Barnett disavows second-image analysis, yet bases his entire model on the influence Arabist ideas have on Arab ‘societies’.

Barnett's work has been influential on multiple levels. It has constituted an important point of engagement with the Middle East for the IR community, thus helping to generate IR theory,Footnote ⁵⁰ and has more broadly encouraged attention to norms and identity as constitutive factors in world politics. And, it has fed back into Middle East area studies as an example of the utility and explanatory power of constructivism.Footnote ⁵¹ Barnett's ongoing interest has been in the tension between statist norms and those of Arabism in Middle Eastern politics. The 1998 Dialogues in Arab Politics fleshes out an argument first aired in articles in the early 1990s, as well as a chapter in the influential 1996 Katzenstein volume discussed above.Footnote ⁵² As such, Barnett's work forms part of the early wave of post-Cold War interest in identity questions. The author builds on the long tradition of viewing Middle Eastern culture or norms as in constant tension with an imposed states system. L. Carl brown's ‘Middle Eastern political culture’ – the rules of the game since Ottoman times – become, for Barnett, the norms of ‘Arabism’.

Barnett's intention is to ‘advance a narrative of Arab politics that is theoretically distinctive and historically instinctive’ and to:

Barnett defends his focus on the ‘third-image’, that of interstate interaction, by rejecting in perfunctory fashion literature on Middle East state formation that claims that ‘the softer the state is, the more it will gravitate toward transnational ideologies: the harder it is, the easier it finds the forwarding of its own interests’, and that ‘Arab states were more likely to lean on transnational forces if their societies perceived these states as artificial’. While allowing some validity to these second-image interpretations, Barnett rejects them as they assume that ‘“stateness” must be theoretically and logically linked with a particular set of practices tantamount to realism and realpolitik’. He concludes that ‘domestic structures are not the wellspring of international norms; rather, they emerge from interstate interactions’.Footnote ⁵⁴

The problem with this summary dismissal of the literature on domestic structures is that it is justified solely with reference to the constructivism/realism debate. The literature Barnett is rejecting falls broadly within the modernisation (and at least quasi-realist) paradigm that adopts a dichotomous view of state-society relations centred on the Weberian concept of ‘legitimacy’, as suggested by the phrase ‘their societies perceived these states as artificial’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Barnett has decided in advance only to study interstate interactions – to ‘understand why Arab states competed through symbolic means to establish the norms of Arabism’. At no point does he entertain the possibility that state-society relations may be more complex or nuanced than this, or that there may be analyses of domestic structures that do not result in ‘realpolitik’ conclusions but nonetheless disrupt the parsimony of the interstate dialogues model. In engaging with, if only to reject, the modernisation tradition of area studies, Barnett reveals his acceptance of its terms of reference. Such selective rejection of the literature on state-society relations would perhaps be understandable were it not for the central role Barnett's model actually accords to societal variables in informing the ‘norms of Arabism’.

Barnett is very specific about the content of Arabism as a normative framework, which means more than just feelings of solidarity or common purpose among Arabs: the norms of Arabism were ‘created’ in the interwar period, secured during the decade 1945–55, and then they declined after 1963.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Arab norms that emerged out of the machinations around the Baghdad Pact, and which were subsequently reinforced concerned, were: 1) the status of Israel and the question of Palestine; 2) relations with the West; and 3) the prospects and desirability of unity.Footnote ⁵⁷ These three issues formed the basis of the Arab ‘dialogues’ Barnett describes. But the links between these specific concerns and the resonance they have with the putative Arab nation so often invoked to explain regional peculiarities are simply asserted and ultimately rest on generalisations about the views of Arab society:

Barnett puts the Middle East forward as a test case for an approach of universal scope and is primarily concerned with using the region to build a case against realism, since ‘the tools of conflict did not come from a military arsenal. They came from a cultural storehouse’.Footnote ⁵⁹ His findings are generalisable because ‘identity debates may be more prominent, or at least more easily identifiable, in Arab politics for what may be historically specific reasons, but their prominence helps illuminate some features of global politics that have largely been ignored by scholars of international politics’.Footnote ⁶⁰Although there is no reason why the Middle East should be any less involved in the internecine paradigm wars of IR than any other part of the world, the assertion that culture and ideas, the historical legacies of empire, and – especially – the lack of congruity between state and nation mark out or explain the peculiarities of Middle East politics remains at best hypothetical. Although making a case for a ‘third image’, or systemic, approach to normative change in the Arab world, Barnett's case rests ultimately on a ‘second image’–domestic or societal – variable. But he is silent on how – and which specific parts of – populations readily identify with, and thus shape, the symbols of Arabism.

Examples of the imprecision with which societal variables are addressed, and the silence on how norms and identities are ‘co-constitutive’, abound in the book. In explaining Nasser's decision to enter into union with Syria in 1958, for example, Barnett identifies lack of pressure from society to enact particular polices as evidence of the causal nature of interstate dialogues, in the process detaching norms from the identity that supposedly sustains them:

Barnett's invocation of ‘societal elements’ is revealing. While Nasser's pursuit of prestige in the eyes of Arab publics was undoubtedly real, it is nonetheless striking the extent to which regional norms have been analytically separated from the societies to whose identity they supposedly relate. The structural characteristics of the societies involved, and the ways in which they mediate between identity and norms, are ignored or invoked as straw men in order to further the argument. It is hard to imagine which ‘unforgiving societal elements’ in the Egypt of 1958, for example, could have pressured Nasser into doing anything. The state was organised in a tightly corporatist fashion and Nasser enjoyed broad populist appeal. The only opposition of any strength, the Muslim Brotherhood, had been harshly suppressed, and the weak communist movement (which in any case opposed union) survived strictly at the regime's pleasure. We will return to this question below.

If the formation of the UAR represented the apogee of Arabism as a regional norm, for Barnett, the subsequent squabbling within the radical Arab camp sowed the seeds of its eventual demise. The outcome of Nasser's bitter quarrel with Abd al-Karim Qasim of Iraq, by discrediting unity, ‘would further the cause of statism’ as a regional norm.Footnote ⁶² The decline of Arabism is portrayed in dialectical relationship to the rise of the norm of sovereignty, with the two representing opposite ends of a continuum. For Barnett, the ‘norms of sovereignty’ have progressively triumphed over those of Arabism in tandem with the increased legitimacy of the Arab states themselves:

The regionalist tautology is restated: something should be distinctive about Arab politics because they are Arab politics. The ‘rise of statist identities’ means the narrowing of the incongruity between state and nation as individual states and their leaderships become more legitimate. The attendant modernisation package enables leaders to partake of global norms, freed from the distorting influence of society's Pan-Arab identifications. This, in turn, is translatable in political or foreign policy terms as openness to the West, rapprochement with Israel and acceptance of existing state borders. It is not incidental that the dialogues model sees evolution toward ‘normal’ politics corresponding so closely with core Western interests in the region, especially given the political context in which ideational approaches to world politics developed.

A Mannheimian approach to ideas in the Middle East

An understanding of the role, significance and provenance of ideas in the international relations of the region, can also be enriched by applying insights derived from the sociology of knowledge, as elucidated by its principle founding father, Karl Mannheim.Footnote ⁶⁵ Mannheim's critique, via Marx, of Hegel mirrors in some ways the current paper's case against moderate constructivism and remembering Mannheim's relationship with IR as a discipline revives an old, yet clearly still relevant, debate. His ideas are familiar to students of IR primarily via E. H. Carr who, in his 1939 work The Twenty Years Crisis, applied insights about the role of classes and groups in the formation of ‘ideology and utopia’ to the state as a corporate actor to the international realm.Footnote ⁶⁶Carr justified this move by rejecting Marx's discovery that ‘all thought was conditioned by the economic interest and social status of the thinker’, noting that ‘[t]his view was perhaps unduly restrictive. In particular Marx, who denied the existence of “national” interests, underestimated the potency of nationalism as a force conditioning the thought of the individual’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Mannheim had rejected Hegel's idea that ideology (or what may now be termed ‘identity’) was unified and stabilised at the level of the nation-state, varying with nationality as a volkgeist. Following Marx, he insisted that intellectual forms and worldviews varied with social class, and not only between states or nationalities. Carr in a sense brings Hegel ‘back in’ by stressing the ‘potency of nationalism’. This had the effect of allowing state to eclipse class as the source of ideology and locus of normative or cultural change, which arguably left a heavy mark on the discipline of IR as a whole. It is thus fitting to return to Mannheim for a way to bring ideas back ‘inside’ the state.

Karl Mannheim argued that the ideas and ideologies we associate with modernity originated in the experience of social groups, in particular the rising bourgeoisies in the states of Europe that sought to wrest political power from the church. Mannheim saw ideological change (or shifts in national identity) as a continuous, and destabilising, process; with the social mobility produced by capitalism leading elite intellectuals to assimilate the concerns and worldviews of lower strata, while rising groups adopted elements of elite culture.Footnote ⁶⁸ The result was a revolutionary dialectic wherein ‘ideology’, which legitimised the status quo, embraced elements of ‘utopia’ that would, if realised, upset the established order, and vice versa. There is more to Mannheim's sociology than this, but these insights are most suggestive for our purposes.

For constructivists norms and identity are mutually constituted. But, in Barnett's work at any rate, this co-constitution of the norms of Arabism and Arab identity is asserted rather than demonstrated. The section that follows shows, firstly, some of the ways in which the norms of Arabism identified by Barnett do in fact relate to local identities and, secondly, the ways in which statist norms are also related to these identities. These processes reinforce, rather than contradict, each other. For reasons of space, the discussion below is suggestive and introductory, rather than exhaustive, in nature. No attempt is made to cover equally or comprehensively all parts of the Middle East, or to justify the examples cited. My intention is not to develop a grand theoretical alternative to the dialogues model for explaining state behaviour, but is rather to suggest ways in which a sociology of knowledge approach could provide a better foundation for analysing the role and provenance of ideas as ‘wellsprings of international norms’ in the Middle East.

The straightforward association of the norm of sovereignty with externality, as opposed to internal identities like Arabism or Islam, appears on the surface to be justified historically: ‘modern’ ideas and institutions, including state sovereignty, originated in Europe and were exported around the world via imperialism. But, as we know from Mannheim, the ideas themselves were not the product of European culture or identity per se. The Westphalian norm of sovereignty related fundamentally to the worldviews of the rising bourgeoisies of Europe. It expressed the transition from feudalism to absolutism and the interests of aspiring classes in that change.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although the ‘capture’ of the state by bourgeoisies successfully disguised the fact, they were not primarily attributes of European ‘national’ cultures or identities.Footnote ⁷⁰ The same applies, as will be shown below, to the Middle East.

To be sure, statist norms, ideology, and structures did not arise in the Middle East, as in Europe, out of indigenous social struggle, though it is wise to be cautious about too categorical an insistence on the West's exclusive ownership of capitalism and its institutional and intellectual forms.Footnote ⁷¹ But they were nevertheless championed by intellectuals of discernable social groups: those belonging or linked to the expanded ruling and bureaucratic elites of Egypt, Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Intellectual innovators during the formation of the modern Middle East were often landowners, merchants or professionals associated with the small but growing capitalist sectors that emerged, with variable orientations vis-à-vis the state, in the Ottoman Empire, Iran and Egypt. Westphalian norms, of the sovereign nation-state as the primary and ultimate form of political identification, generally speaking reached the Middle East via a small class of elites with an interest in maintaining their position at the intersection of local and global markets. They were strongly encouraged by imperialism and advanced by elites who strove with varying degrees of success, often through temporary alliances with established – generally religious – sources of knowledge production, to connect them with existing worldviews and structures. This applied to the supporters of the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, as it did to the coterie of intellectuals around the Muhammad Ali dynasty in Egypt and the narrow educated intelligentsia that gave conceptual form to Iran's Constitutional Revolution.

Modern norms thus had a clear class association in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and such ideas may initially have appeared superficial, representing ‘ideologies in the banal sense of the word, imported as readily as new fashions in clothes’.Footnote ⁷² But as Aziz al-Azmeh has memorably countered, although such ideas:

The international expression of this ‘regime of modernity’ linked to the formation of national markets which ‘established the state as the main actor in the cultural and legal fields, making the state the node of hegemonic activity within society’, is the norm of sovereignty. The modernity of early Arab, Iranian and Egyptian nationalisms included – indeed necessitated – veneration of the norm of sovereignty. Awareness of and respect for sovereignty became, as the modern Middle East took shape, part and parcel of upper and, increasingly, middle class culture. To cite one example, in perhaps the most ostensibly ‘artificial’ of nascent Arab states, Iraq, there was ‘some inherent contradiction between the ideal of one Iraqi people and that of one Arab nation, but the element of contradiction was mitigated by the fact that the aim of pan-Arab unity – as distinct from inter-Arab cooperation – was at no time actively pursued’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some of the popularity of the more radical (as opposed to monarchical) Pan-Arabism among the middle classes, particularly the military, in the 1930s and 1940s can be attributed to economic concerns that would, with time, change:

The consolidation of a national (that is, Iraqi) market and borders eroded the salience of middle class Pan-Arabism and may help explain the subsequent dominance of communism as an explicitly statist movement in Iraq.

The genesis of many Pan-Arab or pan-Islamic ideas, and their articulation with statism, can be traced to intellectuals from religious establishments. The intellectuals of the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly ‘ulema [sing. 'alim], men of religious learning. Ulema in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and Iran were not a class apart but were stratified according to their own hierarchies and intermingled with the rest of the population. Some, as Hisham Sharabi notes, came from the lower classes in the villages and towns and were ‘formed intellectually by essentially the same type of training and education’.Footnote ⁷⁶ But religious establishments also owned land, a factor that placed them squarely within the emerging globalised political economy of the region.

This was particularly the case in Iran, where they also collected their own taxes and enjoyed significant independence from the Qajar state.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, on the contrary, the ulema grew increasingly dependent on the state for their livelihoods.Footnote ⁷⁸ To the extent ‘national’ identities were emerging they did so initially via these indigenous intellectuals who could bridge the gap between elites and the masses, combining statism with existing discursive – that is Islamic – traditions. In nineteenth century Iran, the revolutionary character of Shi’ism, propagated by ulema that shared with broad sections of the population disgruntlement against the Qajar state and the intrusions of imperialism, nonetheless proved instrumental in creating an Iranian sense of national identity that would, with the 1905–1907 Constitutional Revolution, further the cause of statism. As has been observed of the revolutionaries: ‘they frequently referred to the teachings of Imams ‘Ali, Hussein, and Hassan; but not a single one of these Shi'i Imams had ever spoken of elected National Assemblies’.Footnote ⁷⁹

In Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran intellectuals crafted ideologies that synthesised potentially destabilising universalist (that is, revolutionary or utopian) new ideals with the existing social glue of Islam. Intellectuals and politicians of this generation were concerned above all with political independence and the creation and safeguarding of the modern institutions through which their political and economic aspirations could be mediated and furthered.Footnote ⁸⁰ The political universe, until the end of the First World War, was relatively narrow and confined to these elites, but the norms they established, in often antagonistic partnership with the colonial powers, remained as the Ottoman Empire was carved up into Mandates, Egypt became a subservient constitutional monarchy and Iran fell under the authoritarian modernising regime of Reza Shah.

Nationalism as an integrative process

As the political sphere deepened further in the interwar period to include a larger generation of new middle classes that would come to advocate different political and ideological strategies, the vertical exchange of ideas continued as a two-way process. The notion that ideologies have not remained static over time, or among social groups, is not alien to scholars of Middle Eastern politics and International Relations. As Raymond Hinnebusch, engaging with Barnett's dichotomy, has stressed:

Eric Davis, more broadly, has argued with respect to Islamic revivalism that ideological trends are intimately linked to social change and should not be viewed ‘isomorphically’, or detached from their immediate contexts.Footnote ⁸² But such recognition has not been integrated into the dialogues model even though there is no evidence that identity ever ceased to be socially contingent. The ideology-utopia dialectic, in other words, did not end in the 1950s.

From the 1930s nationalism came to reflect the aspirations of this new generation of middle classes in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, often termed the effendiyya.Footnote ⁸³Although it is from within this group that the more ‘radical’ variant of Arabism arose – as Hinnebusch and others have noted – what is not always emphasised is the extent to which middle class intellectuals also embraced statism – ideas were moving both up and down the generational and social ladder. The political climate in the Middle East was not one of peasant revolution, and the ‘mass’ movements of the time – the Muslim Brotherhood, Ba'th, socialists, communists – were largely, though not exclusively, vehicles for the urban middle classes. They were indeed revolutionary, but tended more toward the French rather than Chinese model. To be sure, they resented the established elite's monopolisation of political authority, positions and social prestige. But they identified to a large extent with the interests of those elites in maintaining a minimum level of stability and continuity, as while they:

The excluded and ambitious formed a rising counter-elite whose intellectuals, ‘subject to the ideological and political pull both of the classes above and below them’,Footnote ⁸⁵ were the architects and theoreticians of nationalist revolutions following the Second World War. They shared rural connections, and often conservative religious backgrounds, that certainly informed their worldviews and political strategies. In the case of Iraq, for example:

They combined these sensitivities with statism, meaning that following independence each of these orientations was sustained by regimes and among the middle classes, where the revolutionary movements and parties maintained, to varying degrees, their followings. The variable relationship between these middle class movements, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, is one that must be taken into account when scrutinising the role of ideas.

Students of nationalism in general have long recognised these dynamics. Tom Nairn, for example, has termed nationalism the ‘modern Janus’ to refer to the fact that social movements striving to achieve progressive modern goals – industrialisation, prosperity, independence, democracy – look inwards and backwards to draw on indigenous cultural resources and memories and mobilise mass support. Nationalist movements do not simply invent or ‘imagine’ national communities as the initial slate is never blank: ‘all that there was [for nationalists] was the people and peculiarities of the region: its inherited ethnos, speech, folklore, skin colour, and so on’.Footnote ⁸⁷ These resources are used to craft ideologies that blend the universal with the particular. The most successful such movement in Egypt was the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, but here and elsewhere other movements tried in different ways to harness local resources for national ends: the ‘domestication’ of Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian and Palestinian communist movements should be seen as processes in which localised versions of Marxist ideas came to inform the ‘norms of Arabism’ described by Barnett.Footnote ⁸⁸

Engaging with modernity meant accepting the sovereign nation-state as the supreme object of political identification, but disguising or ‘universalising’ that allegiance in order to resonate with broad-based political programmes. Social movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Ba'th and communist parties, did not eschew statism, or the acceptance that diplomacy, sovereignty and compromise may be part of international politics. But they significantly augmented acceptance of the sanctity of the nation-state with supra- and sub-state loyalties. For the intellectuals of the Muslim Brotherhood, this meant elaborating a theory of Arab solidarity that was integral to their vision of Islam, solidarity with Palestinians as Muslims, a concept of umma as the aspirational focus of loyalty and the ultimate desire to restore the Caliphate.Footnote ⁸⁹ For communists, on the other hand, the focus was on the class struggle internally, which, with some success, they connected to the external struggle against imperialism and Zionism.Footnote ⁹⁰

The emergence of competing national identities – in a process the reverse of that described by Mannheim in Europe – involved the ideological welding together of the ‘modern’ ideas that had undergirded the transition to ‘enlightened absolutism’ in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire since the early nineteenth century, with new ones derived by the counter-elite from the pre-existing traditions of society. Normative change reflected not only local reactions to European imperialism – the mechanism by which statism and the norms of sovereignty were spread around the globe – but also revolutionary change within the social formations being drawn into the international system.Footnote ⁹¹

Reintegrating the Second Image

The interstate, or third image, perspective results in a distorted picture of the role of ideas. We must incorporate the domestic level. It is instructive, in suggesting how this might be achieved, to return to the politics of the United Arab Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s – considered to be pivotal in the transformation of Arabist norms and emblematic of their power in driving regional politics. A closer look at the events of this period illustrates the pitfalls of the dialogues model and the advantages of the more sociological approach suggested here. Far from being a ‘game’ carried out by Arab state players, regional politics had deep reverberations in Arab societies. Nasser's ‘turn to the right’ following the rise of Qasim in Iraq expressed the regime's real nervousness about the left as a domestic opposition in Egypt and Syria. It is not irrelevant to note that from 1958 thousands of communists were arrested in Egypt, leftist newspaper editors were sacked, and select members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood were brought into government.Footnote ⁹² In the Iraqi case, the domestic stakes were perhaps even higher. As Peter Sluglett has observed:

The apparent rise of ‘statism’ and the practices associated with the norms of sovereignty arguably owed more to the insecurities of the Arab regimes, nervous about the deepening of revolutions in individual states, than to the increased legitimacy of either the states system or state leaderships. Communists in Iraq and Egypt were against Arab unity as it would provide a cover for the expansion of Nasserist absolutism and a brake on the deepening of revolution.Footnote ⁹⁴ In this case it was a nominally universalist societal movement representing the interests of a politically frustrated section of the middle class (and in the Iraqi case majority sect) that was working toward the entrenchment of state sovereignty, while regimes trumpeted Arabism. The phase of Arab summitry from 1963, during which, as Barnett notes, the Arab states apparently reinforced and elevated the norms of sovereignty; those same states became their most bellicose toward Israel, vowing for the first time to ‘liquidate’ it.Footnote ⁹⁵ But this was arguably not as much about pandering to society as it was providing an excuse for ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ Arab states to unite against the revolutionary tendencies in their societies. The order of causation in the following observation may, in other words, be reversed:

It may have been the ‘temporary truces’, entered into for domestic reasons, which led to the displays of bellicosity toward Israel.

Norms related to the threat of war (anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism) have continued to reinforce, not contradict, statism by providing a socially intelligible justification for state military and coercive apparatuses. The threat of interstate war, even if premised on ‘Arabist’ norms, encourages the integration of the Arab state into a global normative system, since

But this (realist) proposition that the nature of the international system constrains, obliges or encourages statism must be balanced against the observation that societal actors also manipulate anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist sentiments with ultimately statist effects. Governments do not have a monopoly on the ‘instrumentalisation’ of foreign policy.Footnote ⁹⁸ It has been recently argued that Arabism, while it has declined at the state level, has remained of high salience in society and amongst opposition movements. This is in reference to the role of groups like Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood that keep alive anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist causes as well as the role of new media in the crystallisation of the Arab ‘public sphere’.Footnote ⁹⁹ But the ongoing interests of states in sustaining Arabism, and societal movements in encouraging statism, need to be acknowledged and further explored.

Some recent examples may serve to illustrate this point. Across the region, demonstrations against the 2003 invasion of Iraq expressed not just anger directed against imperialists, but also middle class frustration at the blocked, stagnant or corrupt political systems in the states that had failed to prevent it. In Egypt, for example, the years following the 2000 al-Aqsa intifada and the Iraq invasion of 2003 witnessed the formation of the kefaya movement, which linked Muslim Brothers, Nasserists, and others in a movement for democracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This impulse was echoed by intellectuals across the region, many of whom contended that, among other things, ‘Arab countries need to embark on democratic reform because authoritarian regimes cannot form a bond with their population and thus are easily defeated militarily’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The so-called Ceder Revolution or ‘Independence Intifada’ in 2005, which aimed at ejecting Syria from the Lebanon, represents a further example of Arabist norms (the word intifada invoking the Palestinian uprising) driving a move toward greater respect for sovereignty and statism. Perhaps most indicative of the mingling, and mutual reinforcement, of norms of Arabism and sovereignty between state and society is the 2005 decision by Hizbullah to enter the Lebanese government, in part as a way of retaining its military apparatus and ensuring the legality of its armed resistance against Israel. As Lara Deeb notes,