Booksology Making Sense of the Arab State is a book edited by Heydemann & Lynch. The authors of the book clarify that regimes are central and crucial actors when analyzing the state. There is a distinction between the state and the regime; these are two conceptual terms that are often used and explained differently.
To distinguish between regime and state. We note that a regime is the set of rules and norms, but when we refer to regimeness in the Middle East, we mean the ability of how authority and power are exercised. There is a puzzle that needs to be solved, knowing how the regime is resilient when there are ineffective institutions and weak states. Among the arab states, stateness, governance, and how state-society relations and modes of resistance to the state become organized are different. There is no focus on expressions of specific social actors, instead more emphasis on state autonomy.
In Arab governments, the postcolonial period has resulted in leaders stressing isolation and colonial aggression through authority while promoting specific socioeconomic groupings. Regimes seek legitimacy through sectarian identities, favoring certain communities such as Sunnis and Shia, sometimes excluding Kurds. These states are not fragile, but rather fierce, asymmetrical, and reliant on Western powers. When confronted with huge protests, these regimes may be more resilient than traditional models of state weakness. For example, the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90 produced no changes in the regime.
To delve more into the concepts of regime and state, it is crucial to understand despotic power and the expansion of that power. Some factors helped the stabilization of the state in the 1970s, such as bipolarity during the Cold War and similarity between monarchs and republics in terms of favoring the ruling elite. These states have sometimes acted according to Weberian concepts, strengthening regimeness, supporting non-state actors imposing loyalty and citizenship, and they acted developmentalist other times to advance regime interests.
There are reasons, however, that contributed to the weakness of the state as relying on “insider” elite asabiya, and state-led modernization in time exhausted itself. This is applied to non-oil countries. Different chapters illustrate convergence/divergence through examples. Egypt exemplifies high convergence, with pressure and patronage uniting regime and state institutions. Tunisia initially separated due to limited political liberalism, but has recently re-converged under authoritarian rule. The Gulf monarchies, most notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, are also showing convergence, as rentier riches and regime-led modernization strengthen centralized authority. Iraq and Lebanon, on the other hand, are stark examples of divergence: divided authority, sectarian conflicts, and foreign intervention have weakened central control and resulted in several power centers. Non-state actors in Iraq are not considered adversaries or direct threats to the state; rather, they are viewed as political competitors. The same pattern of clear disparity can be seen in Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Jordan, meanwhile, remains convergent, with the monarchy maintaining authority.
To criticize the state-regime concept, the war theory is also applied in the book, which makes the state more stable. Unfortunately, in the case of the arab states region’s history of lost wars tended to delegitimize regimes as the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Furthermore, in the book, Middle Eastern states are categorized differently. Stronger states as Turkey and Iran, started as imperial centers. To a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia is compared to this category as well and was able to expand despite imperialism. Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco are characterized by being stronger than the Levant because they inherited historic traditions of statehood consistent with borders. Other states are internally weak in the sense that their borders do not satisfy identity, such as Syria, Lebanon, and post-invasion Iraq. This explains the incidents in the aftermath of the Arab Spring based on each country and its category.
The main issue of the Arab uprising was excluding large segments of the population. The inability to incorporate social actors in the Middle East resulted from a lack of social homogeneity. That’s why during the arab protests, people demanded good governance, including social mobility, distributive justice, and economic security. Among the external reasons behind the Arab uprisings were the US imposition of sectarianism in politics after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, along with Saudi-Iran rivalry. It is apparent from this that many Middle Eastern states have no enemy greater than their own governments.
Recent politics of the regime have been situated around the ease of doing business. For example, the Abraham Accords and Oslo agreements saw Israel as a business-friendly partner and disregarded it as a colonial settler or an extremist in Palestine, a plan that Israel has long desired to realize, that its apartheid state and crimes against humanity would be disregarded. In return, arab states benefited from transfer investment financing, technological innovations, and most importantly, surveillance systems accessed from Israel, collecting data to ensure loyalty to the regime, preventing future protests or unrest. New constructions have also been made to make it harder for protestors to gather.
To summarize, Arab leaders who inherited states from the former Ottoman Empire faced the challenge of western-imposed borders, among other difficulties after colonialism, but they sought to forge the nation from above, accompanying Weberian state centralization of power. From another perspective, European expansion incorporated Middle Eastern states into the periphery of the world capitalist system, an economic obstacle they had to overcome through developmentalism. None of these was by accident; the imperial West aimed to establish a hierarchy in which the MENA states were at the bottom, rather than seeking to export fully sovereign states. This was done by dividing and fragmenting the Middle East region into weak states; some states were created very small, such as the Gulf states, to be dependent on Western powers.
Overall, the region exhibits a continuum in which sectarian or post-conflict systems undergo profound fragmentation and divergence, while rentier and security-driven regimes maintain strict regime control.
