Analyzing the Foreign Policies of the Middle East and North Africa: A Conceptual Framework

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Notes

This was particularly so during the period of the Cold War. As Clapham puts it: ‘the dominant focus was on the relationship between the superpowers, with a secondary but still important emphasis on relations between other industrial states such as those of Western Europe. Even the study of “North–South” relations characteristically had a heavy emphasis on North–South relations, … rather than on South–North ones'. Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: the Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3.

Bahgat Korany and Ali Dessouki (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Arab States (Boulder: Westview, 1991 – 2nd edition).

Bahgat Korany et al., (eds.), The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World (London: Macmillan, 1993).

Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Middle Eastern States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002).

This list draws on an earlier version in Gerd Nonneman, ‘Saudi–European Relations, 1902–2001: a Pragmatic Quest for Relative Autonomy’, International Affairs, Vol. 77, no. 3 (July 2001), pp. 631–61: at p. 633.

Graham Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

Michael Brecher, Crisis Decision–Making: Israel 1967 and 1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament (Boulder: Lynne Rienner); and see J. Hagan, ‘Domestic Political Explanations in the Analysis of Foreign Policy’, in Laura Neack et al. (eds.), Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in its Second Generation (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice–Hall, 1995), pp. 117–44.

Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

J. Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

R. Siverson and H. Starr, ‘Regime Change and the Restructuring of Alliances’, in American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 38 (1994), pp. 145–61.

H. Müller and T. Risse–Kappen, ‘From the Outside In and from the Inside Out: International Relations, Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy’, in D Skidmore and V Hudson (eds.), The Limits of State Autonomy: Societal Groups and Foreign Policy Formulation (Boulder: Westview, 1993).

Joe Hagan, ‘Domestic Political Explanations in the Analysis of Foreign Policy’, p. 120.

Bahgat Korany, ‘Foreign Policy in the Third World: an Introduction’, in International Political Science Review, Vol. 5 (1984), no. 1, pp. 7–20.

Nonneman, ‘Saudi–European Relations, 1902–2001’.

See for instance Bruce Moon, ‘The State in Foreign and Domestic Policy’, in Laura Neack et al. (eds.), Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in its Second Generation, pp. 187–200.

A term much used but variously defined in the literature. In essence, it is meant to be a state's characteristic patterns of behavior – whether seen as the result of the state's position in a system of balance of power (James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), or, as rightly observed by Holsti, as also driven by policy makers' own perceptions and definitions, and thus as much domestically as externally generated (K.J. Holsti, ‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’, in Stephen Walker (ed.) Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis (Durham: Duke UP, 1987), pp. 5–43. For a good review see Lisbeth Aggestam, ‘Role Conceptions and the Politics of Identity in Foreign Policy’, ARENA Working Papers 99/8, available on < http://www.arena.uio.no/ publications/wp99_8.htm > .

K. Holsti, ‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’, in Stephen Walker (ed.) Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 5–43: at pp. 38–9.

Christopher Hill, ‘The Historical Background: Past and Present in British Foreign Policy’, in Michael Smith et al. (eds.), British Foreign Policy: Tradition, Change and Transformation (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 25–49: at p. 30.

Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

Stephen Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

Korany and Dessouki (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Arab States; Hinnebusch and Ehteshami (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Middle Eastern States.

A point suggested by Raymond Hinnebusch, at the Workshop on ‘The Determinants of Middle Eastern and North African States’ Foreign Policies: With Special Reference to Their Relations with Europe’, at the Third Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, Florence and Montecatini Terme, March 20–24, 2002.

Steven David, ‘Explaining Third World Alignment’, in World Politics, Vol. 43, no. 2 (1991), pp. 233–56.

John Ikenberry, ‘The State and Strategies of International Adjustment’, in World Politics, Vol. 39 (1986), no. 1, pp. 53–77.

Discussion paper at Workshop on ‘The Determinants of Middle Eastern and North African States' Foreign Policies: With Special Reference to Their Relations with Europe’, at the Third Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, Florence and Montecatini Terme, March 20–24, 2002.

This is notwithstanding the stress laid on the ideological factor in Moshaver's contribution on Iran, in this volume: indeed, in the final analysis, the ‘average’ of Iran's policy output since the late 1980s does in fact conform to the pattern I outline.

Clapham, Africa and the International System.

Gerd Nonneman, ‘Constants and Variations in Gulf–British Relations’, in J. Kechichian (ed.), Iran, Iraq and the Arab Gulf States (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 315–50.

Gerd Nonneman, ‘The Autonomy of “Dependent” States: the Case of the Arab Gulf States’, paper presented at the MESA Conference, San Francisco, Nov. 2001 (available from the MESA [Middle East Studies Association of North America] secretariat).

Clapham, Africa and the International System , p. 64 and passim.

Ibid., p. 65.

Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Introduction and Framework of Analysis’, in Hinnebusch and Ehteshami (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Middle Eastern States, pp. 1–27.

Morgenthau made a similar point with reference to the independence of small states: Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1964 – 3rd ed.), p. 177, where he refers to ‘their lack of attractiveness for imperialistic aspirations’. Morgenthau also already recognized the factor of great power competition.