The Three Environments of Middle East Foreign Policy Making and Relations with Europe

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Notes

World Bank Data Series 1985–95.

Observation and confidential discussions in Doha, Qatar, April 2003.

The summary which follows is drawn from my ‘Rentiers and Autocrats, Monarchs and Democrats, State and Society: the Middle East between Globalisation, Human “Agency” and Europe’, in International Affairs, Vol. 77, no. 1 (Jan. 2001), pp. 175–95.

Bahgat Korany, Rex Brynen and Paul Noble (eds.), Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World. Vol. 2: Comparative Experiences (Boulder: Lynne Rienner: 1998), pp. 269–71.

Ibid., p. 271 – an assessment based in large measure on the work of Gudrun Krämer (especially her ‘Islam and Pluralism’, in Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble (eds.), Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World. Vol. 1: Theoretical Experiences (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995, pp. 113–28) along with other case studies.

Giacomo Luciani, ‘Resources, Revenues and Authoritarianism in the Arab World: Beyond the Rentier State?’, in Brynen, Korany and Noble, Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World. Volume 1: Theoretical Experiences, pp. 211–28. For his and some others' earlier work on rentier states in the Middle East, see Luciani (ed.), The Arab State (London: Routledge, 1990).

See, for example, Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Democratization in the Middle East: The Evidence from the Syrian Case’, in Gerd Nonneman (ed.), Political and Economic Liberalization: Dynamics and Linkages in Comparative Perspective (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), pp. 153–68; and Hinnebusch, ‘Calculated Decompression as a Substitute for Democratization’, in Korany, Brynen and Noble (eds.), Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World. Volume 2: Comparative Experiences, pp. 223–40.

See Tim Niblock and Emma Murphy (eds.), Political and Economic Liberalisation in the Middle East (London: British Academic Press, 1993); and Nonneman (ed.), Political and Economic Liberalization.

Emma Murphy, Economic and Political Change in Tunisia: From Bourguiba to Ben Ali (London: Macmillan, 1999). Also her ‘Legitimacy and Economic Reform in the Arab World’, in Sven Behrendt and Christian-Peter Hanelt (eds.), Bound to Cooperate – Europe and the Middle East (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, 2000), pp. 311–41.

Murphy, Economic and Political Change in Tunisia, p. 8.

See especially the collection by George Joffé (ed.), Perspectives on Development: The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (London: Frank Cass, 1999).

Diana Hunt, ‘Development Economics, the Washington Consensus, and the European–Mediterranean Partnership Initiative’, in ibid., pp. 16–38: p. 17. This is a useful review of the ‘Washington Consensus’ and critiques of it, along with a careful examination of the case of the southern Mediterranean countries.

See especially the chapter by Alfred Tovias, ‘Regionalisation and the Mediterranean’ in Joffé (ed.), Perspectives on Development, pp. 75–88, as well as the contributions from Jon Marks, Grahame Thompson and Bernard Hoekman in the same volume.

Hunt, ‘Development Economics, the Washington Consensus, and the European–Mediterranean Partnership Initiative’, p. 30.

See Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Stephen Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Systemic Approaches to Middle East International Relations,’ in International Studies Review 1:1, Spring 1999, pp. 11–31; and Hinnebusch and Ehteshami (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Middle Eastern States.

For the case of Saudi Arabia, see Anthony Cordesman, The Gulf and the West (London: Mansell Publishing, 1988), and id., Saudi Arabia: Guarding the Desert Kingdom (Boulder: Westview, 1997).

This section draws on an earlier analysis in Nonneman, ‘Constants and Variations in British–Gulf Relations’, in J. Kechichian (ed.), Iran, Iraq and the Arab Gulf States (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 315–50, at p. 339.

As illustrated in Iran's posture during the Kuwait crisis and the 2001 campaign against Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. For analysis underpinning this assessment see also Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria and Iran: Middle Powers in a Penetrated Regional System (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 43–6; Gerd Nonneman, Terrorism, Gulf Security and Palestine (Robert Schuman Centre, Policy Paper no. 2002–02) (Florence: European University Institute, 2002) (obtainable from the EUI, < www.iue.it > ). I recognize this assessment is somewhat at variance with the analysis of Moshaver in this volume.

George Joffé, ‘The Western Arab World: Background Assessment’, in Gerd Nonneman (ed.), The Middle East and Europe: the Search for Stability and Integration (London: Federal Trust, 1993), pp. 197–201: at p. 200.

That is at least the view of Sid Ahmad Ghozali, former Prime Minister of Algeria, as expressed at the V ^ème Forum International de Réalités: Le Maghreb et l'Europe une vue à moyen terme (Tunis, April 24–26, 2002).

Roberto Aliboni, ‘Collective Political Cooperation in the Mediterranean’, in Roberto Aliboni, George Joffé and Tim Niblock (eds.), Security Challenges in the Mediterranean Region (London: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 57.

Dimitris Xenakis and Dimitris Chryssochoou, The Emerging Euro-Mediterranean System (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 17.

See Nonneman, ‘Constants and Variations in British–Gulf Relations’.

Some of the most useful include Christopher Piening, Global Europe: The European Union in World Affairs (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), Chapter 4; Xenakis and Chrysochoou, The Emerging Mediterranean System, part II; and Søren Dosenrode and Anders Stubkjær, The European Union and the Middle East (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), Chapters 3–5.

Piening, Global Europe, pp. 72–3.

Haifaa Jawad, The Euro-Arab Dialogue: a Study in Collective Diplomacy (London: Ithaca Press, 1986).

Gary Miller, ‘An Integrated Communities Approach’, in Gerd Nonneman (ed.), The Middle East and Europe: The Search for Stability and Integration, pp. 3–26: at p. 7.

Piening, Global Europe, p. 74.

Ibid., p. 90.

E. Grilli, The EC and Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 198.

See the ‘Rome II’ European Council decisions of December 14–15, 1990, and the Commission review that underlay it, ‘Re-directing the Community's Mediterranean Policy’ (23 November 1989); EC Commission, Bulletin of the European Community, November 1989, paragraph 2.2.29. Also Commission Document SEC (90) 812, 1 June 1990.

EC Commission, DG External Relations, ‘Internal Paper on Regional Integration’ (mimeo) of April 9, 1991, p. 4.

The report was first published in 1992, and, in its 1993 edition, as Gerd Nonneman (ed.), The Middle East and Europe: the Search for Stability and Integration.

See Commission document COM (93) 375, September 8, 1993, laying out a new direction for EU cooperation with the Middle East; and Commission Document COM (93) 458, 29 September 1993, on Europe's possible role in the peace process.

‘Strengthening the Mediterranean Policy of the European Union: Establishing a Euro-Mediterranean Partnership’: COM (94) 427, October 19, 1994 (quote taken from p. 5).

For a recent review of the Barcelona Process, see Xenakis and Chrysochoou, The Emerging Euro-Mediterranean System, Chapter 4: ‘The Barcelona Process: Structure and Evolution’ (pp. 74–94).

Wolf observes that the EU's approach to the EMP combines ‘liberalism within and mercantilism without’. See his ‘Co-operation or Conflict? The European Union in a Global Economy’, in International Affairs, Vol. 71 (1995), no. 3, p. 333. See also the analyses in the edited collection by Joffé (ed.), Perspectives on Development.

Jörg Monar, ‘Institutional Constraints on the EU's Middle East and North Africa Policy’, in Behrendt and Hanelt, Bound to Cooperate, pp. 209–43.

Gerd Nonneman: ‘The Gulf: A Background Assessment’, in Nonneman (ed.), The Middle East and Europe, pp. 55–62: see pp. 60–61; and Miller, ‘An Integrated Communities Approach’, p. 11.

These assessments are based in part on informal conversations with EU Commission officials and GCC officials and academics, in a number of meetings in Brussels, Riyadh, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and other locations over the period 1995–2003.