The Struggle for the State in Jordan

The Social Origins of Alliances in the Middle East

Jamie Allinson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857728692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do the states of the Arab world seem so unstable? Why do alliances between them and with outside powers change so suddenly? Jamie Allinson argues that the answer lies in the expansion of global capitalism in the Middle East. Drawing out the unexpected way in which Jordan's Bedouin tribes became allied to the British Empire in the twentieth Century, and the legacy of this for the British Empire in the twentieth century, and the legacy of this for the international politics of the Middle East, he challenges the existing views of the region. Using the example of Jordan, this book traces the social bases of the struggles that produces the country's foreign relations in the latter half of the twentieth century to the reforms carried out under the Ottoman Empire and the processes of Land settlement and state formation experiences under the British Mandate. By examining the attempts of Jordan to create foreign alliances during a time of upheaval and instability in the region, Allinson offers wider conclusions the nature of interaction between state and society in the Middle East

CHAPTER 1

FRAGILE ENMITIES: THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN STATE RECONSIDERED

Were an observer to look around the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, she would find a scene not only of catastrophic destruction, conflict and counter-revolution but one in which concepts of ‘international relations’ and ‘geopolitics’ appeared simultaneously vital and dissolved to the point of irrelevance. In sites such as Syria, Libya and Yemen, the meaning of state sovereignty itself seemed to have collapsed, while regional and global powers entangled themselves further in alliances with trans-, non-, sub- and para-state actors: yet none appeared able durably to achieve their goals. The explanation for this state of affairs lay, in the words of one Western policy maker, in a ‘battle about belief and about modernity’: most especially the alleged excess in the Arab world of the former, and deficiency of the latter.¹

This notion that the Middle Eastern state, or the Third World state more generally, is deficient in some quality that would render its behaviour comparable to its European or North American counterpart, is a widespread one. The states of the Arab world in particular seem to switch their allegiance from ally to enemy with violent alacrity, usually in concert with attempts by their ruling regimes to placate some domestic opposition or with the collapse that results from failure to do so. The contrast with the more enduring alignments of the Euro-Atlantic states is a marked one, and easily drawn.

Yet is there a deeper substance to this contrast? Why do the states of the Middle East make such geopolitical alignments?² Do they do so on the same basis as the states of the Global North, or are they distinguished by the inapplicability of theoretical explanations derived from the Northern experience? Are the rulers of Middle Eastern states – of states in the Global South – really so autonomous of, or insecure within, their societies that they freely manoeuvre between external and internal allies, seeking only to maintain their hold on power?

This book answers these questions through the history of one particular state and one particular kind of phenomenon: the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its geopolitical alignments. However, the implications of the argument contained within it extend beyond these limits. The claim made in this book – that Jordan’s geopolitical alignments in the 1950s derive from uneven and combined development (UCD) – addresses the distinction between the politics of colonising and post-colonial societies. I argue against the idea of a teleological standard of modernity against which post-colonial (in particular, Arab) states are found lacking. The argument of this book, however, differs from post-colonial arguments on the region³ in presenting uneven and combined development as a process of contradictory universalisation,⁴ wherein the universalising imperative is that of dissolving ‘the different forms, in which the labourer is an owner and the owner labours’.⁵ The outcome of such a process, as I demonstrate in the case of Jordan, is quite remote from any notion of a homogeneous capitalist modernity and provides the material underpinning to the hybrid form ascribed to the post-colonial state. Jordan, then, tells us something about the state in the wider Middle East: but is this something that we need to know?

Realism without sovereignty?

The question of the post-colonial Arab state – its ‘stateness’ or lack thereof, the supposedly deficient character of its sovereignty, the apparent ease with which its internal conflicts become matters of regional or global interference – refracts a series of assumptions about the politics of the Middle East and the Global South as a whole. These assumptions are those of unilinear development and the passage to an ideal type of sovereign state. The argument that follows from these assumptions is that the distinctive external politics of Arab states results from their failure to meet some standard, established by and embodied in the states of northwestern Europe and its offshoots, of integration, legitimacy and representation of the national interest. As I demonstrate below, this argument informs most work on the international relations of the Global South, and offers only a form of explanation by absence that cannot illuminate the actual trajectories of a given state. Not only this: the theoretical engagement of international relations (IR) with the Southern state reveals what Justin Rosenberg calls ‘the classical lacuna’.⁶ This term refers to the separation of geopolitical and social modes of explanation, to the extent that the ruling regimes of southern states are seen as acting according to the rules of sovereignty under anarchy even within their own societies.

The engagement of mainstream IR scholars with the Global South has sprung largely from the apparent inapplicability of the prevailing model of the state to much of the globe.⁷ That model in IR theory remains stubbornly derived from the precepts of neorealism. Critics still largely take its assumptions as their point of departure. In brief, these assumptions hold that states are all the same kind of thing (‘like units’), concerned first of all with maintaining their security and effectively distinguished only by the power resources that they can bring to bear in this endeavour.⁸ The ‘national interest’ can be defined, and it consists first and foremost of assuring the security of the state. Scholars from the constructivist tradition might disagree about how this is defined and the degree of its incompatibility with other states but would nonetheless accept the validity of the concept of a national interest distinct from the interests of the ruling personnel.⁹ Where Waltz found his model confounded was in the case of states whose regimes were insecurely embedded in societies that could not be assumed to operate as sealed boxes identical to the state.¹⁰ Although further research fleshing out the neorealist programme made use of evidence from the South,¹¹ mainstream IR theory has continued to be subject to the criticism that its core concepts and models of interaction are restricted to a particular Northern experience, insufficiently able to explain, understand or evaluate the geopolitics of the South.¹²

What is the nature of this lack of fit according to the critics of mainstream IR theory as applied to states outside of Western Europe and its offshoots, and what are the solutions to it? The arguments are varied but convergence is visible around the notion of the Southern state as fundamentally different from the Northern experience – indeed, in some sense deficient in qualities that would allow traditional IR theory to apply to it. The basis of such theory in the notion of an autonomous state capable of carrying through its plans, at least within domestic society, results in difficulties in its extension to southern states where this assumption does not hold.¹³ According to this view, the Southern state falls low down on the continuum of ‘stateness’¹⁴ and allowance must be made for this condition when analysing its international relations.

There is some degree of consensus then that the particular character of southern states and their international relations lies in the insufficiency of nation-state identity, centralised authority and sovereign independence. The result of this disaggregation is the ‘Third World security predicament’ in the form of a ‘lack of internal cohesion […] lack of unconditional legitimacy of state boundaries, state institutions and state governing elites; easy susceptibility to internal and inter-state conflicts; distorted and dependent development’.¹⁵ Although it may be able successfully to penetrate society and extract resources from it, the Southern state frequently finds its ambition to regulate its citizens’ behaviour frustrated.¹⁶ The story is thus a dichotomous one, divided between ideal types of institutionalised and peaceful northern polities on the one hand and the fragile, late developing South on the other.¹⁷

If, as these accounts claim, the Southern state is different, then one would certainly expect additions or revisions of IR theory to be necessary in the light of these differences. Such an enterprise has been undertaken in the theories based on ideas of ‘quasi-states’, ‘subaltern realism’ and ‘omni-balancing’.

The same fundamental notion is at work in all of these: that the Southern state is insufficiently embedded in or representative of its society and thereby compelled to adopt a different mode of geopolitical alignment to that of northern states, a mode that serves the needs of that ruling regime rather than those of the whole society. This argument has been made in juridical terms by Robert Jackson’s ‘quasi-states’.¹⁸ More pertinent to the discussion of the alignments of southern states is Mohammed Ayoob’s idea of ‘subaltern realism’, and similar models, such as ‘peripheral realism’.¹⁹ Ayoob argues that there is a particular ‘Third World Security Predicament’ that consists of the fact that the ‘Third World state elites’ major concern – indeed, obsession – is with security at the level of both state structures and governing regimes’.²⁰ The insufficient ‘stateness’ and competing centres of authority in the Southern state, perhaps with more popular legitimacy than ruling elites themselves, causes these states to be highly susceptible to external interference.²¹ Domestic and international insecurity are thus inextricably intertwined: state elites seek to construct or participate in regional balances of power in order to further their state-building enterprise, perhaps at the expense of neighbouring states undergoing the same process.²² The entire process results from the unavoidable imperative to adopt the model of the sovereign state: the Southern state having to telescope into a few decades the process of building and expanding legitimate authority that took centuries in the North, and unsurprisingly not doing as well.²³

Mohammed Ayoob thus roots the claimed inadequacy and insecurity of the Southern state regime in an explicit schema of development in which southern states are at a particularly early stage. More concerned to extend than replace the framework of neorealism, Stephen David proposes a revision to the propositions of that research programme: the idea of ‘omni-balancing’.²⁴ Omni-balancing is particularly important because it has been taken up in explanations of the geopolitics of Arab states: most especially, Jordan.²⁵ David’s claim is that the idea of a balance of power formed by states against a countervailing threat from another state, or joining with that state where the option of balancing is not available, is essentially correct.²⁶ However, the conditions of the Southern state require some revisions to this theory, he argues. The specific conditions are essentially those outlined in the theoretical perspectives above: both the domestic and international environments are unpredictable and potentially lethal to rulers unsuccessful in maintaining their regimes.²⁷ Furthermore, the recent and artificial nature of the post-colonial state means that regimes act not ‘in the national interest’ but in their own, or that of some subnational group.²⁸

On the above basis, David argues that the assumption that external threats will be the greatest security concern does not hold for southern states. Rather, the rulers of these states face at any one time ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ adversaries that could be either external or domestic: the resultant behaviour may involve aligning with or appeasing apparently more threatening states (potentially a secondary adversary) in order to be more able to face down the primary internal adversary.²⁹ This is ‘omni-balancing’ – balancing in all directions. The theory therefore represents an extension of neorealism rather than a replacement for it. The idea that politics is a balancing act amongst competing interests is retained: but the Southern state appears as an exception to the rule by which this balance is peacefully achieved at the domestic level. Regimes are then seen as the actors rather than the state itself, acting in their interests rather than that of the security of the state and balancing between external and internal threats to preserve these.³⁰

Sovereign state and primordial society in the Middle East

The conception of the Southern state as deficient, hampered from reaching full sovereign status by primordial allegiances, operates particularly strongly in discussions of the Middle East. As we have seen, the basic claim is that the liberal self-image of the state is valid within its assumed Western zone of origin, characterised by ‘the unconditional legitimacy of the state, a societal consensus over basic values and the near-elimination of violence from political life, which permitted a strong identification of the security of the state with the security of its citizens’,³¹ but that no such easy identification can be made amongst late-coming states.

This dichotomy, applied to the study of the Middle East, tends to become framed in disciplinary terms. Andrea Teti thus identifies a gap between Middle East studies based on a hermeneutic understanding of the region’s supposedly sui generis characteristics and the discipline of international relations in which the politics of the region appear as variations of the Euro-Atlantic experience taken as a universal law.³² A circular argument results, in which the Middle East is posited as an exception and then called to account for its exceptionalism.³³ There is ample evidence of the predominance of this view in the canon of studies of international relations of the Middle East and in Middle East studies. Exceptionalism is most often vested in the claim – far from baseless – that the states of the region area are constrained from ‘normal’ operation by the persistence of regional (Arabist, Islamic) or sub-state (tribal, sectarian) influences.³⁴ L. Carl Brown codifies these elements into a series of ‘rules’ of the ‘Eastern Question game’: these consisting mostly of diplomatic shortsightedness or attempts to ensnare external powers in various political initiatives.³⁵ Michael Barnett gives these constraints a more definite content by referring to the ‘norms’ of opposition to Zionism and imperialism and affirmation of Arab identity³⁶ while Marc Lynch extends this notion of intersubjective norms of Arab identity into the public sphere beyond the state.³⁷

An evolutionary model thus underlies much of the analysis of the international relations of the Middle East. As Ewan Stein argues, ‘the study of states in the Middle East has often stressed their artificiality and illegitimacy’, engendering a dichotomy ‘in which the state form (its borders and institutions) is treated as self-evidently part of the Western Westphalian system that was organised around the concept of sovereignty; while Arab society remains in a pre-modern condition’.³⁸ Malak Mufti’s research encapsulates this view in arguing that as regimes build stable political institutions – as their degree of ‘stateness’ increases – their amenability to pan-Arab regionalist schemes decreases and thereby they come to resemble more closely the sovereign unitary actors of realist IR theory.³⁹

Here we reach the point of contact with the idea of omni-balancing in the Arab state. Omni-balancing places states on a continuum between the fully legitimate, embedded state of the West (which can then be understood through the lens of c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Glossary
• 1. Fragile Enmities: The International Relations of the Middle Eastern State Reconsidered
• 2. States, Social Relations and Uneven and Combined Development
• 3. Beneath the Whip of External Necessity: Social Transformation in Late Ottoman Transjordan
• 4. ‘The Fiery Gallantry of the Desert’: Land and the Social Origins of the Jordanian Military
• 5. Murder and Pamphlets: Jordan and the Baghdad Pact
• 6. Jordan between Nationalism and Colonialism
• 7. Conclusion
• List of Interviewees
• Notes
• Bibliography