by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
All this seems to point to the end of the postwar civic order in the Middle East. But it just might be the case that, as with Mark Twain, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. Two pieces of evidence point in this direction. First, the upsurge in labor activism targeting issues of political economy—and not just shop issues—indicates that resistance to the new dispensation has not disappeared; it has merely assumed a new shape.69 Second, the global economic meltdown of 2008 has once again put the Keynesian option on the table. In other words, there may be yet a fourth moment in the dialectical process that encapsulates global and regional political economy since 1929.
10
THE MIDDLE EAST THROUGH THE LENS OF CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
Globalization, Terrorism, and the Iraq War
Waleed Hazbun
UNLIKE TERMS FOR AMERICA, Asia, Europe, or Africa, the “Middle East” denotes a region of the globe defined from the point of view of the north Atlantic states and is devoid of geographic or cultural referents. As a result, plenty of confusion and imprecision surrounds the question of the precise location and boundaries of the Middle East.1 Nevertheless, as with the term “the West,” the American public and news media often associate the Middle East with particular political, economic, and cultural characteristics. Among these associations is that the Middle East represents a territorial exception to globalization. Regardless of how globalization is defined or understood, the Middle East is often referred to as disconnected from its processes and resisting its effects. More specifically, the region is commonly viewed as having been excluded from the post–Cold War trends toward economic liberalization, global market integration, and democratization that have more closely integrated the West with other regions of the globe.
To explain this exception, some suggest that access to oil resources created “rentier states” able to forgo globally competitive production and political accountability.2 Others emphasize what they consider to be a distinct Arab-Islamic political culture as the causal factor.3 Most notably, historian Bernard Lewis places blame on what he sees as the Islamic world’s historic failure to adapt to the economic and political practices of Western modernity.4 In making their claims these views all evoke the notion of Middle East exceptionalism (also referred to as Arab exceptionalism). Although one can easily compile tables of data and charts that show the Middle East, or more specifically the Arab-Muslim world, as a region, to be “less globalized” and “less democratic” than most other regions of the globe, this chapter warns of the dangers of thinking about the region in exceptionalist terms. The notion of Middle East exceptionalism generalizes across a very diverse collection of peoples, states, and economies. For example, it may refer to oil resources in one context and the role of religion in politics in another, and furthermore, such characteristics differ widely across the region. It nevertheless often refers to an undifferentiated entity, the Middle East or the Arab-Muslim world, where politics and economics seemingly function according to a unitary logic. Most critically, Middle East exceptionalism also suffers the faults of other exceptionalist notions, such as American exceptionalism. As historian Daniel Rogers argues, “When difference is put in exceptionalist terms, in short, the referent is universalized.”5 Rogers points out that notions of exceptionalism beg the question, “Different from what?” and imply the answer, “Different from the universal tendencies of history, the ‘normal’ fate of nations, the laws of historical mechanics itself.”6 In other words, notions of Middle East exceptionalism avoid analyzing the diverse peoples and states across the Middle East in terms of dynamics found elsewhere and perpetrate the notion that the rest of the world can be understood as variations of a common type or that all societies, except those in the Middle East, are evolving toward a common political and economic system.
Rather than contest the data and observations that sustain portrayals of Middle East exceptionalism, this chapter views this discourse through the lens of critical geopolitics. As an approach to the study of global politics, critical geopolitics questions models and representations that claim to be objective, disinterested portrayals of reality. It argues that language used in these geopolitical discourses tends to reflect particular political as well as cultural attitudes and interests.7 This chapter shows how notions such as Middle East exceptionalism do more than represent objective data; they sustain what I refer to as a particular “geopolitical imaginary.” In contrast to geopolitical maps, which are defined by criteria such as borders, topography, and population, geopolitical imaginaries refer to the territorial terms of reference, or the mental maps, that policy makers, academics, popular media, and the general public use to translate aspects of geography—such as location, distance, and space—and the impact of mobility and flows into geopolitical terms.
As an approach to the study of international politics, critical geopolitics can be understood as similar to constructivist international relations theory.8 In contrast to rationalist approaches, such as neorealism and neoliberalism, constructivism denies that state interests and security (including notions of threat) can be objectively determined by an assessment of material resources and relative power capabilities. Constructivists argue that identities and intersubjective understandings help define, for example, whether or not a powerful neighbor with nuclear weapons is viewed as a threat. The approach also shows how geopolitical change generally occurs as part of the process of shifting identities and relationships between states. By a similar logic, the political importance of geopolitical imaginaries is that they shape discourses and mobilize ideological power, rhetorical force, and political affect to promote certain notions of threat, geopolitical goals, and forms of authority over territory. In doing so, they often shape the policies and behaviors of states.
This chapter shows how notions such as Middle East exceptionalism operate as a geopolitical imaginary similar to the geopolitical maps that define state interests and threats in global politics. But unlike geopolitical maps—which offer a complex mapping of political, economic, and geographic features—the geopolitical imaginary of Middle East exceptionalism divides the world into two by limiting its vision to a binary register defined by the presence or absence of a range of characteristics associated with globalization. The result is a mapping that flattens topographies and leaves a hole in the space where patterns do not match. That space is viewed in exceptionalist terms, that is, it is regarded as not following historical patterns elsewhere, and the binary lens of this imaginary fails to register, let alone understand, viable alternative patterns. This chapter shows how, especially after the end of the Cold War, Middle East exceptionalism came to operate as an imagined geography similar to those, as Edward Said argued, developed within Western scholarship of the Arab and Muslim Middle East during the era of colonialism.9 As geographer Derek Gregory explains:
These are constructions that fold distance into difference through a series of spatializations. They work, Said argued, by multiplying partitions and enclosures that serve to demarcate “the same” from “the other,” at once constructing and calibrating a gap between the two by “designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’.” “Their” space is often seen as the inverse of “our” space: a sort of negative, in the photographic sense that “they” might “develop” into something like “us,” but also the site of an absence, because “they” are seen as somehow to lack the positive tonalities that supposedly distinguish “us.”10
As discussed below, some of the most influential commentators about the Middle East within the American media view the region through the geopolitical imaginary of Middle East exceptionalism. In doing so, they tend to portray the politics and economics of the Middle East as defined by factors distinct from those found in other countries and other regions of the world. As a consequence, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, they came to view the rise of security threats emanating from the Middle East as a
product of the region’s failure to embrace globalization. This view led them to argue that American policy toward the Middle East should set out to “fix” the region, as it lacked sufficient internal forces for change and reform. This discourse naturalized the notion that the United States can and should play a role in advancing that progress by unblocking the internal obstacles standing in the way of the region “joining the rest of the world.” Although the factors that led to the American invasion of Iraq are numerous and complex, this chapter argues that these exceptionalist discourses framed both public and official understandings of Bush administration policy toward the Middle East in the wake of 9/11. The depiction of Iraq as the archetype of the most dangerous form of exceptionalism facilitated the Bush administration’s efforts to use force as part of a broader effort to transform the political and economic landscape of the Middle East. This chapter concludes by noting that even though the Bush administration sought to justify its policies by portraying them as a break from what it termed “Middle East exceptionalism,” such an approach was blind to the diverse ways that globalization is experienced and imagined in the region, and it simultaneously embraced the notion of American exceptionalism: that the United States is uniquely endowed with a mission to define the fate of other nations.
CARTOGRAPHIES OF GEOPOLITICS AND GLOBALIZATION
When American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan invoked the term “the Middle East” in 1902, he was seeking a geographically defined label to mark the strategic value of the region around the Persian Gulf.11 In his essay “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” published in London’s National Review, Mahan emphasized the need for Britain to establish naval bases in the region to secure its trade and communication lines between British-controlled Egypt and India, which he viewed as under threat from Russian expansion southward and German development of the Berlin-Baghdad railway. As such, the early use of the term “Middle East” somewhat differs from—though is not inconsistent with—the contemporary usage of the term “the Orient” that defined a linguistic and cultural object. Oriental studies, or Orientalism, was concerned not directly with geopolitics but rather with the culture, languages, and history of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. According to Said, Orientalism “was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them.’).”12 In contrast, Mahan’s use of the term “Middle East” was a product of the distinctive genre of strategic analysis known as geopolitics. Broadly defined, geopolitics refers to the territorial dimensions of international politics.
The study of geopolitics focuses on the implications of nature, geography, and material factors on patterns of international politics defined primarily in terms of territorial competition between great powers.13 The development of “classical” geopolitical reasoning in the late nineteenth century was largely a product of technological changes and colonial territorial expansion that led great powers to view their interests within the framework of a “closed system” at the global geographical scale. As geographer John Agnew explains, geopolitics “framed world politics in terms of an overarching global context in which states vie for power outside their boundaries, gain control (formally and informally) over less modern regions (and their resources) and overtake other major states in a worldwide pursuit of global primacy.”14 Both Mahan and fellow geopolitical strategist Halford J. Mackinder—who emphasized the advantages of land power over sea power—measured the strategic value of the Middle East region in terms of its geographic position in the global system over which great powers competed for mastery.15
For its practitioners, geopolitics operated as a seemingly scientific description of the material environment that defined the conditions for international politics. In the wake of World War II, classical geopolitics as a field was generally viewed as increasingly irrelevant due to technological changes, decolonization, and the rise of a liberal economic order in which states gained relative power through trade, increased economic efficiency, and alliances rather than through territorial control.16 In the United States, the academic study of international politics was soon dominated by realist international relations theory. American international relations theory helped reframe the language of global politics and foreign policy in terms of an anarchic system of sovereign territorial nation-states, each with different degrees of material power.17 Whereas the United States sought to forge a negotiated, but U.S.-led, liberal international economic order and security community amongst its democratic, capitalist allies, foreign policy doctrines and policies continued to be profoundly shaped by geopolitical features, such as the containment of communism and the fear of “falling dominoes” or the spread of communism across the developing world.18 In this system, the Middle East remained a region of critical strategic importance. Not only did it retain important maritime communications and trade routes and was situated between the spheres of influence of great powers, but it also expanded its strategic value considerably due to the presence of massive oil reserves and the global development of petrol-based economies and militaries. Throughout the Cold War, rival superpowers competed for influence in the region, leading to complex patterns of shifting alliances.
With the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization in the 1990s, the saliency of classical geopolitics seemed to decline as international relations became increasingly defined by global markets, electronic communications, free trade, capital flows, and the erosion of borders. Many observers noted the seeming decline of distance and some even pronounced the “end of geography.”19 A critical feature of American foreign policy under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton was the goal of “enlargement,” that is, the effort to expand the scope of the liberal international order across formerly communist East Europe and the newly democratic, emerging markets of Latin America and Asia. As Agnew argues, “This views powerful states, above all the United States, as sponsoring a new global ‘market access’ regime that is producing a new geopolitics of power in which control over the flows of goods, capital, and innovation increasingly substitutes for fixed or static control over the resources of bounded territories.”20
In this context, the state-dominated economies and authoritarian regimes of the Middle East looked out of step and they posed a challenge to the extension of a U.S.-dominated post–Cold War order. Beginning with the 1990–91 Gulf War, the U.S. advanced its interests through the projection of military power, directed mostly at containing Iraq and Iran and providing security for Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. As the phenomenon of globalization dominated academic and policy debates, the Middle East appeared excluded from the post–Cold War trends toward economic liberalization and global market integration as well as democratization. Rather than adjusting to become “trading states” competing for capital and markets in the global economy, Middle Eastern states were viewed as remaining territorially oriented—guarding borders, territorial resources, and state control over their closed national economies—and Middle Eastern societies and political culture were commonly viewed as resisting global trends and unwilling to “confront the age of globalization.” In this context, many scholars of the contemporary Middle East, often marginalized from the ongoing globalization debates, focused on compiling explanations for why the region was being “left behind” by globalization. When the Middle East was mentioned in the globalization literature, it was usually to note, by contrast, the region’s failure to follow these “global” trends. As such, it has not been uncommon to find references to “the region’s status as eternally out of step with history and immune to the trends affecting other parts of the world.”21
POPULARIZING MIDDLE EAST EXCEPTIONALISM
Although the notion of Middle East exceptionalism is well represented in academic portrayals of the region, it finds its most prolific representations in American popular media and commentary. One of the most influential popularizers of the geopolitical
imaginary of Middle East exceptionalism is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who gained fame for his prize-winning coverage of the Middle East in the 1980s. In the 1990s he began to frame his reporting, in the form of a widely syndicated twice-weekly foreign affairs column, around the concept of globalization. In 1999, he published the first edition of his bestseller, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a textbook that is often taught in high school and college classrooms. As exhibited in its title, Friedman presents contemporary politics, economics, and culture through a binary framework defined in terms of the integrating and freedom-expanding forces of global capitalism (“the Lexus”) that are uprooting the territorial attachments and borders (“the olive tree”) that have sustained nationalism and authoritarianism.22
Friedman contends these transformations are driven primarily by technological change, such as the spread of the Internet, and are making economic liberalization and market integration nearly unavoidable while creating pressures for democratization. In the new emerging order, Friedman contends, all economies will become integrated into a single, global economic system disciplined by the need to attract the “electronic herd” of unregulated global financial flows. As a result, all governments will have no choice but to don the “golden straitjacket” and implement neoliberal economic policies or else they will fall to discontented societies demanding economic and political freedoms and be weakened by economic decline and international isolation. In Friedman’s world, the American policy of promoting enlargement and neoliberal globalization may be viewed as an adaptation to technological changes and market forces that no one controls rather than understood as a geopolitical strategy for expanding American hegemonic power.23 With a similar lack of nuance, Friedman equates globalization with Americanization and celebrates its spread.