War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East EDITED BY Steven Heydemann UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London This volume is the result of a project on war and social change in the Middle East, directed and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2000 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data War, institutions, and social change in the Middle East / edited by Steven Heydemann. p. cm. “This volume is the result of a project on war and social change in the Middle East, directed and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-90039-1 1. Middle East—History—20th Century. 2. War and society—Middle East.—3. War—Economic aspects—Middle East. I. Heydemann, Steven. II. Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. DS62.8 W37 2000 956.04—dc21 00-028657 Manufactured in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 10987654321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS acknowledgments / vii 1. War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East Steven Heydemann / 1 PART ONE. WAR, STATE, AND MARKETS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORLD WARS I AND II 2. Guns, Gold, and Grain: War and Food Supply in the Making of Transjordan Tar iq Tell / 33 3. The Climax and Crisis of the Colonial Welfare State in Syria and Lebanon during World War II Elizabeth Thompson / 59 4. War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism: Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East Robert Vitalis and Steven Heydemann / 100 PART TWO. WAR, STATE, AND SOCIETY IN THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST 5. Si Vis Stabilitatem, Para Bellum: State Building, National Security, and War Preparation in Syria Volker Perthes / 149 6. Changing Boundaries and Social Crisis: Israel and the 1967 War Joel S. Migdal / 174 7. War as Leveler, War as Midwife: Palestinian Political Institutions, Nationalism, and Society since 1948 Ye zid Sayigh / 200 8. War in the Social Memory of Egyptian Peasants Reem Saad / 240 9. War as a Vehicle for the Rise and Demise of a State-Controlled Society: The Case of Ba‘thist Iraq Isam al-Khafaji / 258 10. The Political Economy of Civil War in Lebanon Elizabeth Picard / 292 PART THREE. CONCLUSION 11. The Cumulative Impact of Middle Eastern Wars Roger Owen / 325 selected bibliography / 335 list of contributors / 357 index / 361 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Editing a volume is often described as the kind of thing everyone should do ...once. In this instance, however, it was not the editor who bore the bur- den of keeping a project on track but the contributors to the volume who deserve my thanks and gratitude for their willingness to tolerate so good- naturedly the long delays in the preparation of this manuscript. The proj- ect began during my tenure as director of two programs at the Social Sci- ence Research Council in New York—the Program on the Near and Middle East, and the Program on International Peace and Security—and without the support of the SSRC, both fiscal and administrative, the project would not have been possible. We were also fortunate to have received the support of the Ford Foundation through a grant from the Cairo field office that funded the participation of scholars from the Middle East in a conference where initial drafts of some of the papers included here were presented. The conference was held in the wonderful setting of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, thanks to the intervention of Jean Leca, a former mem- ber of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. Although more papers were presented at the conference than we could reasonably include within this volume, the ideas contained in them have had a significant im- pact on the final shape of the project. Within the Council, this enterprise fell under the purview of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East, whose members were an ongoing source of critical guidance and critical support. Joel Migdal, chair of the Committee from 1991 to 1996, was cen- trally involved in the design and conceptualization of this project. He de- serves much of the credit for bringing it to completion. This volume is dedicated to my wife, Gail David, who endured the many absences imposed on me both by my responsibilities at the SSRC and by the demands of bringing this long-running project to a close. vii 1 War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East Steven Heydemann This volume responds to two significant and related gaps in the study of war in the Middle East, one empirical, the other theoretical. The first is a seri- ous deficit in research on war making and war preparation as sources of state and social formation and transformation in the Middle East. With the partial exception of Israel, where the social and institutional effects of per- sistent conflict have received a measure of attention, the study of war in the Middle East has been shaped much more by military and diplomatic histo- rians, theorists of international relations, and journalists than it has by their counterparts in comparative politics, comparative and historical political economy, sociology, social history, and anthropology.1 War has been a growth industry for analysts and researchers of conflict resolution, peace keeping, arms control, and negotiation, as well as specialists on foreign pol- icy and strategic studies. Particular disputes are the subject of voluminous literatures: first and foremost the Arab-Israeli conflict, with the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars not far behind. Yet we know relatively little about how states and societies in the Middle East have been shaped and reshaped by their in- tensive and prolonged exposure to and participation in war making and war preparation, often conducted by regimes that have embraced milita- rization as an everyday tool of governance as much as (if not more than) a means to ensure national security. Despite the now thoroughly noncontro- versial observation that war making, state making, and “society making” are mutually interdependent, there have been no more than a handful of stud- ies that have explored how these dynamics interact in the Middle East.2 Without in any sense disparaging the contributions of the existing litera- ture on war in the Middle East, it remains true that such research has been deficient in its attention to war as a social and political process. The presence of a gap, however, is not in itself justification for a re- 1 2 STEVEN HEYDEMANN sponse. Many topics that go unstudied no doubt deserve their fate. But in this instance, the consequences of this relative neglect are twofold, and they make quite clear its empirical and analytic costs. First, we lack the knowl- edge base that would permit us to explain the effects of war making and war preparation on current political, economic, and social arrangements in the Middle East. If we take seriously the proposition that war is a social process, then understanding these effects deserves our attention. Second and just as important, we lack an analytical basis for determining whether the experi- ences of the Middle East might force social scientists to rethink the general assumptions that have defined research on the relationship between war and state formation in other cases. In some respects this latter concern is the more significant. In the absence of efforts to explore rigorously where Middle East cases align with or challenge current theories of the relation- ship between war and state formation, it will not be possible to construct al- ternative, more satisfactory, theoretical accounts. Without such accounts, our understanding of dynamics that have been central in shaping the con- temporary Middle East will be at best incomplete and at worst distorted. The contributions to this volume take both empirical and theoretical concerns seriously. They present considerable new material about the so- cial, institutional, and political dynamics of war making and war prepara- tion in the Middle East, and thus add significantly to what we know about these processes in the region. They also frame the material, in most in- stances, as a critical response to existing theories of how war making, state making, and social processes like the construction of citizenship interact. In many cases they highlight significant points of divergence between avail- able theories and the realities of the Middle East and thus underscore the value of this region to the larger theoretical enterprise of understanding how war shapes patterns of social, institutional, and state formation and transformation. Considering the scope and scale of war making and war preparation in the Middle East—the sheer intensity of militarization as a persistent and pervasive attribute of everyday life across the region—the paucity of re- search on war as a social and political process is puzzling, not least because academics typically are far too entrepreneurial to leave a significant phe- nomenon unstudied. Why then, has such an obvious and important re- search agenda been left to languish? Answering this question is necessary to help situate the second, theoretical, gap this volume hopes to address: the lack of fit between the experience of war in the Middle East and the re- search base that shapes theory building in the study of war, the state, and society.