Lineages of Revolt. Adam Hanieh

with two core pillars of its power in the region—Israel and the GCC (specifically Saudi Arabia). These two pillars are distinct from other countries in the region in that they form the apex of hierarchies in the regional space. Their relationships with the imperialist core differ from the rest of the region in that they are both able to retain a greater share of the value generated in the region (Israel through its advanced industrial exports and the GCC through its control of hydrocarbon supplies). The United States reinforces these regional hierarchies through aid (military and financial) and political support to these two poles, while also being deeply enmeshed in their economies through flows of FDI and other financial relationships.

      4. The United States has also attempted to use these two poles as the axis for its drawing together of the wider region under its hegemony. Jordan and Egypt have played a specific and highly important role in this process through the QIZs and other agreements with Israel. The European Union has also emphasized this point through the framework of the Euro-Med negotiations. This means that the question of normalization with Israel has a specific centrality to resisting imperialist influence in the region, as does the wider Palestinian movement against ongoing dispossession. This also helps to explain the specificity of class formation in the Palestinian territories (see chapter 5).

      5. The deepening of neoliberal reforms, which has been the necessary corollary of both the EU and US restructuring of the region, has also acted to widen the hierarchical relationships within the region as a whole. Most notably, this has meant the strengthening of the position of the Gulf Arab states within the Middle East and North Africa. This has been most sharply expressed through the internationalization of Gulf capital and the enmeshing of Gulf conglomerates with domestic capitalist classes in the region (see chapter 6).

      6. These realignments also need to be placed in the context of potential challenges to US/ European hegemony at the global scale. While the EU and the United States continue to dominate the political economy of the region, rising powers—notably China and Russia—have increasingly built separate and competing alliances with states in the region. This has been reflected in a partial reorientation of trade and financial flows across the region, but its most important feature has been the alliance of Russia and China with those states that remained largely outside of Western hegemony through the 2000s (notably Iran and Syria).

      These six features of the regional scale confirm the deep interconnection of imperialism with the political economy of neoliberalism in the Middle East. Imperialism is not principally a military project—despite the significance of force to the way it operates—and to conceive of it in this way is to mistake the outward appearances of Western intervention for its essence. Rather, imperialism is primarily about ensuring the ongoing subordination of the region’s political economy to the forms of accumulation in the core capitalist states of the world market. Seen in this light, neoliberalism is much more than simply a menu of “free market” economic policies; it represents a radical restructuring of class relations that acts to facilitate and reinforce the region’s domination by external powers. In so doing, it generates a set of social forces that are internal to the region itself, and that have an objective stake in supporting the new status quo. This restructuring has not just involved the transformation of class and state within individual nation-states but has also produced a new set of hierarchies and intermeshing of social relations across the regional space as a whole. These observations form the basic analytical lens through which to approach the different aspects of the region’s political economy, as explored in the following chapters.