Theory and System in Understanding Middle East International Politics:

  Rereading Paul Noble’s “The Arab System:  Pressures, Constraints and Opportunities”

F. Gregory Gause, III

University of Vermont

gregory.gause@uvm.edu

prepared for presentation at “Noblefest 2002”, June 18-20, Montreal

            As a graduate student in the early 1980’s with an interest in both international relations as an academic discipline and the Middle East as a regional subject, I found myself in a bind.  There were numerous, excellent narrative accounts of international politics in the region that I could read and learn from.  There were more than enough IR theories out there in the academic literature with which to contend.  But the efforts to put the two together – regional realities and international relations theory – were few and far between.  I began to envy my comparative politics colleagues, who could read all sorts of theoretically informed accounts of the domestic politics of Middle Eastern countries.  It was therefore, literally, a revelation when I read Paul Noble’s “The Arab System:  Pressures, Constraints and Opportunties.”[1]  Here was what I was looking for – a work that was properly attuned to the nuances of the region’s politics, but at the same time sought to use theoretical concepts in international relations to provide a larger framework for understanding those nuances.  I had found a model for how to write about the international relations of the Middle East .

            The influence of this article was not limited to one humble graduate student from south of the (Canadian) border.  The recent literature that has attempted to understand the international politics of the Middle East from a systemic perspective is characterized by frequent citations to “The Arab System:  Pressures, Constraints and Opportunities.”[2]  The article repays a careful rereading for the insights it continues to generate about the application of international relations concepts to Middle East regional politics.  I will highlight a number of those insights, and raise an issue on which I have come to disagree with Noble’s analysis, and then suggest some questions that remain to be addressed in efforts to develop a systemic understanding of regional international politics.

Noble’s Systemic Understanding of Middle East International Politics

            When Noble published the original version of the article in 1984, academic debates about international systems were dominated by Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, the ur-text of “neo-realism.”  Waltz identified three elements to any system:  its ordering principles, the character of its units, and the distribution of capabilities among those units.  In international systems, Waltz theorized, the ordering principle is anarchy, because states do not recognize any sovereign authority that has either the right or the capability to overrule their decisions.  The only alternative ordering principle is hierarchy, but, short of a world empire, one will not find a hierarchically organized international system.  The units of an international system for Waltz are states, but he sees no differentiation of function among states.  All states are alike, in that they all seek the same end – survival in the anarchic international system.  In Waltz’s theory, it is the third element, the distribution of capabilities, which does the heavy causal lifting.  International systems change when the distribution of power among the states within them changes between multipolarity and bipolarity.  Multipolar international systems, in his view, have profoundly greater levels of conflict in them than bipolar systems.[3]

            The great strength of Waltz’s work was its parsimony, but that strength limits its applicability.  While Waltz himself was very careful to specify the cases to which his theory applied – global international systems consisting of the great powers – the intellectual power of his model skewed discussions of all international systems, including regional systems, toward his monocausal focus on distribution of power as the driving force behind international outcomes.  Noble’s article had the great virtue of maintaining Waltz’s basic outline of system definition (though using different terminology), while problematizing what Waltz considered fixed:  the organizing principle of the system and the nature of the units making it up.

            Noble began his assessment of the Arab system with a focus on what he termed “unit properties.”  While Waltz saw no “functional differentiation” among units in the international system, and thus dropped domestic political variables out of his definition of international systems, Noble identified the extensive changes in Arab society and the original weakness of post-colonial Arab states as common domestic characteristics among the units of his system that created regular patterns of  international outcomes.[4]  Domestic weakness and instability opened Arab states up to intervention – more political than military – by their neighbors, and helped explain what observers of the Arab world in the 1950’s and 1960’s saw as the chronic instability of regional politics.  This observation was a truism of the empirical accounts of Arab politics of the period; Noble made it part of a more general and parsimonious understanding of the drivers of regional international politics.  More importantly, Noble contends that changes in state-society relations in the Arab world dramatically affected international political outcomes.  As states became stronger in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Arab world was less characterized by the meddling in the domestic affairs of neighbors that was so characteristic of earlier decades.[5]  Here a domestic political characteristic, the relative strength of the state over its society, varied in the same direction at the same time among almost all the Arab states, and produced an important change in Arab statecraft.  Again, many analysts observed this change.  Noble was the first, to my knowledge, to theorize its effects on regional international politics.

            The second level of Noble’s systemic framework is “relational properties (the Arab setting).”  He argues that the commonalities among Arabs across state borders, “the homogeneity among the peoples and elites,” leads to qualitative differences in regional Arab politics when compared to other systems of developing states, in terms of the permeability of domestic political systems and the commonality of political agenda to which all state leaders must react – be it Arab unity in the 1950’s and 1960’s, relations with Western powers or the Arab-Israeli conflict.[6]  This common Arab identity unifies the Arab states, both materially, in terms of the interchange of people and ideas, and metaphorically, in the sense that they cannot escape from the common agenda of issues that stems from being Arab.  However, it also introduces elements of conflict, because an Arab leader can take other leaders to task for not fulfilling their “Arab duties,” and can appeal to the citizens of other Arab states to oppose their leaders on the basis of the higher loyalty to Arabism.  In effect, for Noble, Arabism sets the system apart.[7] 

While he does not explicitly make this argument, I read his analysis here as an implicit criticism of Waltz’s notion that the ordering principle of international systems, anarchy, is not a problematic concept.  Waltz’ s anarchy is the flip side of Westphalian notions of sovereignty, where each unit is completely autonomous (at least in theory) within its own boundaries, and there is a absolute distinction between the domestic realm (a realm of hierarchic order) and the international realm (a realm of anarchy).  Other scholars have questioned this absolute distinction between anarchy and hierarchy in international systems, arguing that there can be different qualities of formal anarchy, from more “mature” anarchies where there is widespread agreement on principles of order to less “mature” anarchies where conflict among the units is more endemic.  In effect, the organizing principle of international systems is not a given, as Waltz contends, but a contested concept in itself.[8] 

Noble’s discussion of the unique “relational properties” of the Arab states highlights the fact that Arabism, particularly in the 1950’s and 1960’s, presented an alternative organizing principle to Westphalian sovereignty for Arabs.  Rather than accept the territorially distinct, separate and legally equal states bequeathed to them by colonialism, many Arabs saw an alternative way of organizing their political geography, into a single, hierarchically organized Arab unit.  The Arab League represented an uneasy compromise between these two principles, basing itself explicitly on the desire for Arab unity while recognizing the sovereign rights of the Arab state members.  This conflict over organizing principles helps us to understand the common origin of the Arab-Israeli conflict and inter-Arab conflicts, as both reflected not simply a rejection of the colonial territorial disposition in the region but the challenge presented to that status quo by an alternative organizing principle, Arabism.  The “instability” seen as so characteristic of regional politics can thus be understood theoretically as deriving from a clash between opposed organizing principles of the regional system, though the specifics of regional conflicts were undoubtedly affected by both regime security issues and by classical balance of power issues.  By opening up what Waltz had declared closed, Noble helps us to understand at a theoretical level the patterns of conflict that have characterized regional international relations.

If the organizing principle of an international system is not a given, but rather a contested concept, then understandings of that principle can change over time.  Noble notes the effects of the “decline” of Arabism from the 1970’s.[9]  In fact, one can see this period, as Noble depicts it, as a time when the ordering principle of the system became much less contested, as both elites and mass publics settled, however grudgingly, on Westphalian notions of sovereignty as the basis of regional politics.  Noble interprets this post-1970 period as one in which the “level of conflict and revisionism within the Arab system declined significantly,” while noting that Arabist notions justifying challenges to the territorial status-quo had not completely disappeared – as evidenced by Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and by the continuing importance of the Palestinian issue in Arab politics.[10]  One can question Noble’s coding of regional politics from 1970 through 1990 as being less conflictual than earlier periods, but only in the context of a more general question about system definition which I will raise below.

Once again, Noble is not unique in his emphasis on the ideology of Arabism as the distinguishing feature of inter-Arab politics, nor in the contention that the waxing and waning of Arabism helps explain regional international political outcomes.  He is, however, the first to try to theorize the role of ideology in the context of a systemic approach to the international relations of the Middle East . 

            Like Waltz, Noble makes the distribution of capabilities the third component of his definition of the Arab system.  While largely agreeing with Waltz about the material bases of any definition of power, he opens that concept up to include the “political capabilities” of states.[11]  Particularly in analyzing relations among Arab states, where  conflicts were more usually pursued with political rather than overtly military means, understanding the power of states as still being materially based (economic levels, educational and cultural levels), but extending beyond simple measures of military power, is an important modification of realist and neo-realist understandings of power.  Noble sees the distribution of capabilities in the Arab world as shifting from a “virtual one-power situation” dominated by Egypt in the 1950’s and 1960’s to a true multipolarity after 1970, with the new resources that oil wealth brought to Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.[12]  Unlike Waltz, who sees multipolarity as a more conflict-prone distribution of power, Noble sees this shift to multipolarity as contributing to the lower levels of inter-Arab conflict after 1970.[13]

            Noble thus sees three mutually reinforcing changes in the inter-Arab system occurring around the same time, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, leading to changes in important international political behaviors and outcomes.  The “hardening” of the Arab state, the declining relevance of Arabist ideologies and the increasingly multipolar nature of the system together account for the decline in the power and prevalence of revisionist statecraft, including unionist projects, the decline of strategies based on the manipulation of the domestic politics of other Arab states, lower levels of inter-Arab conflict and changing approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Noble’s article is the most sophisticated and theoretically informed effort to account for what has widely been recognized as a change in the way the international politics of the region has operated over the decades.  By broadening the Waltzian definition of an international system, he has provided a systemic explanation of a systemic change, rather than the ad-hoc and reductionist explanations usually provided.  That is the great strength of the article, and the source of its enduring influence.

A Controversy:  System Definition

            I contend that the major problem with Noble’s systemic approach to understanding the international politics of the Middle East is his definition of membership in the system.  Is it useful to consider all the members of the Arab League as belonging to a regional international system, to which no other states belong?  That depends upon the criteria by which system membership is determined.  Noble does not dwell on this question, assuming that cultural affinities and self-definition (through membership in a regional organization, in this case the Arab League) are sufficient characteristics upon which to determine membership.[14]  But such a definition ignores one of the major international behaviors that systemic approaches try to explain – conflict.  As geographical proximity is a leading correlate of international conflict, self-selection and cultural criteria that ignore geographical proximity will necessarily generate definitions of systems that cannot help analysts understand important patterns of inter-state conflict.  Raymond Aron pointed out more than thirty years ago that it makes no sense to define an international system in such a way that states engaged in war with each other are not members.[15]

            In this case, the absence of Israel , Iran and the great powers from Noble’s definition of the system makes it very difficult to offer a systemic explanation for international conflict in the Middle East .  Noble recognizes this problem, identifying Israel and Iran as the “periphery” of the system and noting that “at the very stage that conditions within the Arab system became less threatening [after 1970], the larger regional environment was becoming more threatening.”[16]  But relegation of these two important regional players, against whom the Arab states have fought most of their wars, to the “periphery” of the system causes important analytical problems for Noble.  He defines the period between 1970 and 1990 as much less conflictual for Arab states than the period from the end of World War II through Nasser ’s regional dominance.  This was so among the Arab states, by most definitions, but not for the Arab states.  Two major Arab-Israeli wars (1973 and 1982), the onset of the first Palestinian intifada and the longest, bloodiest conflict in modern Middle Eastern history (the Iran-Iraq War) involved numerous and important Arab actors in serious conflict.  Certainly in terms of battle deaths, the period between 1970 and 1990 (before the Gulf War) was much more conflictual than the previous period.  Even those Arab states not involved directly in the fighting were involved in these wars through their alignment choices. 

Noble also defines the 1970-1990 period as being characterized by a reduction in the intensity of ideological conflict among the Arab states.  Again, this is true among the Arab states, by most definitions, but not for the Arab states.  While pan-Arabism as understood in the Nasser period was no longer the force that it had been, the rise of Islamist ideologies, particularly with the Iranian Revolution, subjected a number of Arab states to serious, trans-state ideological pressures that resonated in their domestic politics and greatly affected their foreign policies.[17]  The Iraqi decision to go to war against Iran can only be understood in terms of the political pressures generated within Iraq by the Iranian Revolution.  Likewise, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian and Gulf state backing for Iraq in that war was, at least in part, a reaction to their fear of the contagion effects of Islamist radicalism.  The rise of Islamist groups among Lebanese Shi’a and among Palestinians, in the former case greatly attributable to direct Iranian involvement, had important effects on the Arab-Israeli dynamic as well.

Noble is correct to contend that the organizing principle of Middle East international relations is a contested concept, but he should have included pan-Islamist ideas along with pan-Arab ones among the contestants.  In that way, while correctly identifying the consequences for inter-Arab politics of the declining salience of Arabism after 1970, he need not imply that this decline left the field clear for Westphalian notions of state sovereignty to dominate the region.  Saddam Hussein’s effort to combine Arabist and Islamist rhetoric and symbolism to rally support during the Gulf War is a testament to the continued prominence of both trans-state ideological challenges to Westphalian sovereignty in the region.  The contested nature of the organizing principle of Middle Eastern international politics is a constant over the last 50 years, though the content of the challenging ideology has changed over time.  That constant can help us to understand the persistence of inter-state regional conflict since the end of World War II, not simply inter-Arab conflict but Arab-Israeli and Arab-Persian conflict as well.

Noble’s exclusion of Israel and Iran from his definition of the regional system also has important analytical consequences in terms of the third element of system definition, the distribution of power.  Noble argues that the Arab system changed from one-power dominance ( Egypt ) to multipolarity around 1970.  He attributes this change to multipolarity as an important element in the decline of inter-Arab conflict in the post-1970 period.  Here he enters into one of the more contentious issues in the theoretical discussions of polarity in the international relations literature.  The idea that multipolarity restrains inter-state conflict was common among classical realist scholars like Hans Morgenthau.  However, Kenneth Waltz strongly argued in Theory of International Politics that just the opposite is true, that bipolar systems are less war-prone than multi-polar ones, and that elements of multipolarity contribute directly to the increased likelihood of international conflict.  (The empirical evidence in this general debate is not conclusive.[18])  It is not clear that the diffusion of power in the Arab system would lead naturally to a reduction in inter-Arab conflict.  More damaging to Noble’s argument, however, is the general theoretical agreement that unipolar systems are not conflict-prone, as no other state, by definition, has the resources to challenge the dominant state.  By Noble’s coding, Arab systemic unipolarity correlates with high a high level of conflict.  This is a theoretical anomaly that called for greater explication.

The inclusion of Israel and Iran in the regional system allows the analyst to avoid these sticky theoretical wickets, and provides a much more parsimonious explanation for the relatively high levels of international conflict in the region in the post-World War II period.  If Israel and Iran are included, then the regional system is consistently multipolar over time.  The weight of various actors might change from period to period, but the structure of multipolarity is a constant.  Following Waltz, then, one could argue that systemic multipolarity helps to explain the fact that the Middle East has been a conflict-prone region.

The alternative I suggest – a “Middle Eastern” regional system rather than a purely “Arab” one – better captures the realities of the area’s international relations.  Many of the Arab states, and certainly the states of the Arab Mashriq, devote large amounts of their foreign policy attentions and resources to their relations, both conflictual and cooperative, with their non-Arab neighbors.  Analytically, a “Middle Eastern” regional system conception provides a more parsimonious link between systemic characteristics and regional outcomes.  The consistently high level of regional conflict can be explained by two important system-level continuities – the persistent challenges in the region to Westphalian sovereignty as an organizing principle and regional multipolarity.  A systemic change over time – the “hardening” of state units as they have increased their control over their societies – can explain the decreasing ability of transnational ideological appeals to change the regional political status-quo.  While there are important normative elements in conceptions of an Arab system – many Arabs want there to be a strong and cooperative Arab state system – that play an important role in understanding regional realities, the empirical realities of regional conflict patterns require us analytically to define the system as a regional Middle Eastern one.

Questions:  The Global System and Regional Economic Integration

            The most difficult theoretical question, to my mind, in formulating a systemic understanding of any region’s international politics is how the global system interacts with the regional system.  Dependency theorists have a simple answer to this question:  the regional system is economically dependent upon the global capitalist core, and thus is politically subject to the demands of the core capitalist states.  This is the perspective, modified somewhat, taken by Bahgat Korany and Ali Dessouki in the volume in which Noble’s article appears.[19]  I do not find the dependency perspective adequate for understanding the relationship between the Middle Eastern system, or even the Arab members of that system, to the global system.  More accurately, the relationship is one of asymmetric interdependence.  Middle Eastern states have things that the great powers want:  primarily oil and access to strategic locations.  They can bargain with the leading capitalist states over those assets, gaining promises of protection, economic aid and political support. 

That bargaining is not conducted on a level playing field, to be sure.  The power asymmetries between Arab states, and Middle Eastern states more generally, and the great powers are too wide for the relationship to be based on equality.  However, the dependency perspective fails to capture important historical realities in the way regional states have interacted with the global system, on a number of levels.  First, regional states have been able to defy great powers on enough occasions, in important ways, to call into question the premises of the dependency analysis.  The outstanding example is the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo of the United States, implemented largely by America’s Arab allies (Saudi Arabia in the forefront; Iraq did not participate).  That embargo, unintentionally, led to a huge transfer of wealth from the core to those peripheral states, and greatly increased their power in the international system.  Certainly global bipolarity assisted Arab states in the past in acts of defiance against the West, like Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s refusal to join the Baghdad Pact and subsequent turn to the Soviet Union for military and economic aid.  However, even with the end of bipolarity we see a number of Middle Eastern regional states refusing to accept American diktats on important policy questions, be it Syria’s refusal to accept the Israeli-American proposal for peace in 2000, Iraq’s unwillingness to abide by U.N. Security Council resolutions or Iran’s general disposition against the United States.  The U.S.-Israeli relationship, “special” on numerous levels, also can hardly be seen as one of Israeli dependence on the United States , as that term is used by the theorists.

Second, the very fact that the United States remains involved in the Arab-Israeli peace process is testament to the fact that Arab states have some leverage over it, that they are not in a relationship to the United States of complete dependence.  Once Egypt opted out of the confrontation with Israel and joined the American camp in the Cold War, one can imagine little strategic or material incentive for Washington to care what happened to Syria and Jordan, much less the Palestinians.  Certainly one can fault Washington for, having decided to be involved, not doing enough to bring about a settlement that could assure stability with some amount of justice to all the parties.  However, analytically, the puzzle of why the United States remains involved at all in the peace process can only be solved by recognizing that other Arab states, particularly Arab oil states, see their interests served by that American involvement.  This remains true even with the end of global bipolarity.

Third, the very fact that the Middle East remains the region of the world least affected by the “Washington consensus” of the 1990’s – movement toward an open market economy and political democracy – is testament to the bargaining power it retains in dealing with the global capitalist system and the United States in particular.  One might argue that the autocrats who govern almost every Middle Eastern state are wrong to refuse to get on either the economic reform or the democracy trains.  However, the fact that they can refuse, and remain in power, is a testament to their power to resist global pressures that their colleagues in other parts of the world either cannot or do not want to resist.

While rejecting the dependency framework for understanding the relationship between the global system and the Middle East regional system, I have no alternative to propose.  The idea of asymmetric interdependence captures the reality that regional states retain some bargaining power against the global capitalist system, but provides no guidance in terms of systematic regularities in the global-local interaction.  Sometimes the regional state or states will succumb to the power of outside actors and behave the way dependency theorists would expect; other times they will not.  The analyst can certainly explain the specific circumstances of individual acts of defiance, but there are no general principles suggested to explain what categories or types of defiance are more likely than others, or in what circumstances defiance is more likely to occur.  In effect, asymmetric interdependence describes an empirical reality, but is too underdetermined to be a systemic concept.  This could be a fruitful area for future research in the systemic tradition on Middle Eastern international relations.

Noble does not take on in an explicit way the relationship between the regional system and the global system.  In the context of the volume to which he was contributing, that was someone else’s job.  Nor can he be faulted, given the time at which the volume was published, for not dealing with the issue of the relationship, from a security rather than an economic perspective, between the structure of the global system and the effects of the global system on the regional system.  By 1991 the Middle East regional system had only existed, as a system of independent states, for four decades, during which the global system was bipolar.  It was generally assumed that global bipolarity gave regional actors some freedom for maneuver.  This assumption was both theoretically obvious and empirically ratified, so no one gave it much consideration.  However, with the end of bipolarity, the question of how changes in the  global distribution of power might affect the regional system came to the fore.  The only sustained research on this question has been conducted by Benjamin Miller, in his examination of the different effects of global systemic multipolarity and bipolarity on great power behavior in regional crises and conflict situations.[20]  The effects of unipolarity have generally been assumed – control by the hegemon of regional actors – but the past decade of systemic unipolarity and its impact on the Middle East has not born out that easy assumption.[21]  The interaction between global systemic change and regional politics remains an understudied element of Middle East regional politics.

            A second important question raised by systemic approaches to Middle Eastern international politics is the impact of regional economic integration or interdependence on regional political outcomes.  The “dynamic density” of transactions among units in a system is, according to John Ruggie and other international relations scholars, is properly understood as a characteristic not of the units themselves, but of the system to which they belong.[22]  The “dynamic density” of those interactions among states of the Arab Mashriq certainly increased dramatically during the 1970’s and early 1980’s, in terms of labor and capital flows.[23]  Noble notes the interesting and counter-intuitive point that, when levels of economic integration were highest, the political pressures for unity and a common front on Pan-Arab issues were much reduced from previous periods.  He attributes this to the declining importance of Arabist ideologies.[24] 

However, one could argue that the increased economic interdependence among the eastern Arab states actually was a contributing factor to the decline of unionist political agitation.  Efficient economic exchange requires a common understanding of property rights.  In the modern international system, sovereign statehood provides the basis for that understanding, facilitating economic interaction.  When the costs of revisionism, in terms of disrupting existing economic networks, was low, as in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it was easier for leaders like Nasir to pursue those policies.  As the importance of economic interaction among the Arab states increased, the costs for Arab leaders of challenging the regional status-quo increased.  Not only would aid flows from richer Arab states cease, but inter-Arab private investment could be seriously affected, as could the status of migrant workers from the country raising the revisionist claims.

This point is merely suggestive, however.  The relative decline in the density of Arab economic links, from the oil price collapse in the mid-1980’s and the labor pattern disruptions occasioned by the Gulf War, has not been matched by an increase in demands for Arab unity.  The question of the impact of changes in the level of regional economic integration on regional political outcomes remains, both on the question of regional conflict and/or cooperation and on the appeal of transnational ideological platforms, remains understudied.  Research on the systemic consequences of changing levels of economic interaction need not be limited to the Arab states.  Iran and the Arab oil producers have experienced different levels of interdependence, in terms of their oil production decisions, in different world oil market conditions.  Turkey ’s trade with the region as increased over the past two decades.  The potential effects of Israeli economic integration into the region has been much debated, though with the collapse of the peace process is a less immediate issue than it appeared to be in the mid-1990’s.

Conclusion

            Paul Noble’s pathbreaking article “The Arab System:  Pressures, Constraints and Opportunties” remains a provocative guide to assessing regional international politics from a systemic perspective and an important contribution to the theoretical literature on the international relations of the Middle East .  It does what all good systemic level analyses do:  it makes big arguments about important continuities in the outcomes of Middle Eastern international relations, and provides parsimonious explanations for significant, region-wide changes in the way international politics works.  Like all good articles, it raises more questions than it can answer and stimulates those who disagree with its conclusions to sharpen their counter-arguments.  It is a model for how to study the international relations of the Middle East .