Chapter 2 outlines the development of US and European imperialism in the region from the end of World War II through the first decade of the twenty-first century. It examines the strategic pillars of Western rule in the Middle East from the perspective of military, political, and economic power. Emphasis is placed on the use of financial instruments such as debt and foreign aid as well as a range of trade and investment agreements. This process has taken place in confrontation and interaction with indigenous social and political forces in the area, reconstituting patterns of state and class and opening the way to the penetration of neoliberal reform. It has altered the patterns of accumulation internal to the region itself while differentially integrating various zones of the Middle East into the world market.
This global perspective helps to frame the account, in chapters 3 and 4, of the rise and impact of neoliberalism. The first of these chapters outlines some elements of neoliberal strategy, including privatization, labor market deregulation, liberalization of trade and investment, and changes to financial markets. It focuses in particular on three North African countries—Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt—in addition to Jordan. The emphasis is on the logic that drives neoliberal reform and its ramifications for class development. It also discusses the ways in which neoliberalism has altered the nature of state power in each of these cases. Chapter 4 examines the impact of neoliberalism on agriculture, tracing the ways in which neoliberal reform has linked capital formation across urban and rural spaces while dispossessing people from the land and proletarianizing rural life. Its counterpoint, which is considered empirically, has been the development of large agribusiness conglomerates, linked to international agro-commodity circuits and providing a vital point of accumulation for domestic classes.
The book then turns to two important case studies that are deeply connected to the ways in which the regional political economy has formed through the neoliberal era. Chapter 5 considers these themes in the Palestinian West Bank, examining the ways that Israeli occupation has shaped the development of Palestinian capitalism along highly neoliberal lines. A core argument is that the question of Palestine needs to be viewed through the prism of capitalist development, linked to the nature of imperialism in the Middle East, not solely via a rights-based perspective that focuses on the copious examples of human rights abuse that take place under Israeli control. Chapter 6 concentrates on the extremely significant case of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. It presents an overview of class formation in the Gulf, emphasizing the pivotal position of migrant labor alongside the development of large capitalist conglomerates across the GCC. A major consequence of this has been the internationalization of Gulf capital in the Middle East; this phenomenon is examined empirically through the interpenetration of the Gulf with class formation in the representative example of Egypt.
The book ends with a discussion in chapter 7 of the 2011–2012 uprisings and their implications for further political developments in the region. The background and context are laid out for each of the most prominent revolts—Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria—as well as broad outlines of the Western and regional responses. The aim is to situate these uprisings in the context of the previous chapters. Once again, it is important to emphasize that this book does not present an exhaustive account of the politics and blow-by-blow details of any specific case study—and certainly not a definitive assessment of events that are still unfolding. Rather, it outlines some of the commonalities and specificities of the uprisings, demonstrating that their trajectory can be best understood through the evolution of state and class as mapped throughout this book. Taken as a whole, they indicate that the long-standing social crises facing the Middle East—including the prevalence of authoritarianism, the perpetual economic exclusion, and the marginalization of much of the region’s population—are not a result of too little capitalism but are direct consequences of capitalism itself. These processes of class and state formation constitute the lineages of revolt.
Chapter 2
Framing the Region: Imperialism and the Middle East
The contemporary Middle East is shaped by two important and interlinked dynamics. First, since the mid-twentieth century, the region has represented a vital zone within the wider global economy. Its vast supplies of hydrocarbons, coupled with the prodigious financial surpluses that accompany them, mean that control of the Middle East is a source of enormous strategic power and thus a long-standing flashpoint of global conflict. Second, however, the dynamics of the Middle East’s own social formation, and the struggles that are inevitably bound up with them, form a crucial counterpoint to the rivalries and collusion of foreign powers. For this reason, the region is much more than simply an object of external domination—the histories and struggles of the region are supremely relevant, existing alongside and within the story of foreign rule. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the interaction of these two dynamics and their implications for contemporary patterns of class and state formation. Subsequent chapters will discuss in detail the character of the region’s social relations under the impact of neoliberalism. The aim here is to set the scene for that discussion by providing an overarching account of how the trajectory of imperial domination since World War II has shaped the specificities of the neoliberal era, the means through which this domination has been extended and enhanced, and the ways this has been articulated with—and altered by—particular forms of resistance.
The chapter begins by tracing the extension of US power through the region in the postwar period and detailing its conflict with popular struggles seeking independence and greater sovereignty. US strategy initially relied upon the cultivation of various regional allies, settling in the late 1960s on a strategic partnership with Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as a means to confront the growing strength of Arab nationalist movements. As military defeat pushed back struggles in Egypt and elsewhere, the United States also employed food aid and other forms of assistance to lock development patterns into a dependency on Western imports and financial inflows. In the specific conjuncture of global crisis that racked the world economy in the 1970s, this relationship paved the way for mounting fiscal problems that culminated in the debt crises of the 1970s and 1980s, finally opening the path to the neoliberal reforms that will be explored in later chapters.
This early history confirms that imperialism is not simply a question of military conquest; central to the heightened control of Western powers has been the region’s unequal and uneven integration into global capitalism. The second part of the chapter explores this integration in greater detail, examining the trajectory of US and European relationships with the region through the 1990s and 2000s, as well as the rise of new actors such as China and Russia. The various bilateral trade and financial agreements promoted over these decades have profoundly reworked the nature of capitalism in the Middle East. By reconfiguring the patterns of production and consumption, they have acted to subordinate the region to the circuits of accumulation in the advanced capitalist countries. Understanding these varied paths of integration of the Middle East region into the world economy will be an essential element to discussions of the neoliberal era in later chapters.
The Transition to US Power
World War II signaled a major shift in both the nature of capitalist production and the structure of the world market. Most significantly, the end of the war witnessed a qualitative leap in the internationalization of capital. Capitalist firms, led by those headquartered in the United States, expanded overseas and oriented their production toward international exports. Between 1959 and 1964, US companies set up international