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Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary
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Imagining the Middle East: the state,
nationalism and regional international
society
Ayla Göl
a
a
Depart ment of Int ernat ional Polit ics, Aberyst wyt h Universit y,
Wales, UK
Published online: 24 Jul 2015.
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To cite this article: Ayla Göl (2015) Imagining t he Middle East : t he st at e, nat ionalism and regional
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Cont emporary Thought , 5: 3, 379-394, DOI: 10. 1080/ 23269995. 2015. 1053191
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Global Discourse, 2015
Vol. 5, No. 3, 379–394, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1053191
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Imagining the Middle East: the state, nationalism and regional
international society
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Ayla Göl*
Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
The Middle East is commonly perceived as a zone of cultural and political differences
within the global international society. Imagining the Middle East as a ‘unique’ region
is not a new idea, but relocating this conception within the English School (ES) of
International Relations (IR) is. This article challenges the perceived ‘exceptionalism’
of the Middle East, which claims that the European concepts of state, sovereignty and
nationalism are alien to Islam, therefore preventing the emergence of a regional
international society. The first part highlights the correlation between Eurocentrism
in IR and the lack of interest in regional – area – studies through the critique of
Orientalism and the ES. The second part moves to demonstrate why the ES is more
explanatory than other IR theories in the context of the Ottoman–European relations.
The third part explores the ‘institutional distinctiveness’ of the Middle East, disproving
the notion of regional ‘exceptionalism’ and IR’s foundational Eurocentric assumptions.
This article concludes by arguing that there is a strong case for calling the Middle East
a ‘regional interstate society’, which remains to be a litmus test of whether or not a
truly global international society is possible.
Keywords: The English School of International Relations; Islam; the Islamic State; the
Middle East; nationalism; the Ottoman Empire; pan-Arabism; pan-Islamism; regional
international society
Introduction
The Middle East is commonly perceived as a zone of cultural and political differences in
the global international society. Imagining the Middle East as a ‘unique’ region is not a
new idea, but relocating it within the English School (ES) of International Relations (IR)
is. The editors of this special issue are interested in understanding the relationship
dynamics between the global international and regional international societies. This article
aims to contribute towards a new research agenda, which explores whether or not there is
a regional international society in the Middle East. By initiating this question within the
ES, the existence of an international society at the global level is fundamentally questioned, given that the assumed lack of a Middle Eastern regional society essentially
challenges the Western-global international order.
The main assumptions within this article are threefold: first is that the Middle East is
an illuminating regional case study. This derives firstly from the regions’ close historic
relations with European powers, and secondly from the contested nature of Islam’s
encounter with Western values and institutions in contemporary international relations.
Second, while the study of the Middle East is under-theorized and marginalized in IR, the
*Email: ayg@aber.ac.uk
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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ES, in spite of its weakness and limits, allows us to interrogate the relations between
regional and international levels. Third, the Middle East as a regional context offers both
opportunities and challenges to this interrogation through questioning the expansion of
international society to the Islamic world through the legacy of Ottoman–European
affairs. The findings of this investigation have important value to add to the existing
theoretical and empirical insights of ES scholars through an exploration of the relations
between global international society and a ‘regional interstate society’ in the Middle East
(Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009, 241).
The article challenges the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Middle East, which claims that the
European concepts of state, sovereignty and nationalism are alien to Islam, therefore
preventing the emergence of a regional international society. The article first explains the
correlation between Eurocentrism in IR and the lack of interest in regional – area studies –
despite IR’s claims to be ‘international’. Understanding the current state of the discourse
explains both the perceived absence of a regional international society in the Middle East
and further supports an alternative analysis through the ES. The question of whether or
not there is in fact a regional international society remains both contentious and problematic. Firstly, because this depends how we interpret the constitution of the social
structure of international societies. This question particularly engages with Hedley
Bull’s notion of ‘revolt against the West’ to unpack the relations between regional and
international societies (1984a). The second part focuses on the expansion of international
society, explaining why the Ottoman Empire is identified as transmitter between Europe
and the Middle East. It then shows how the definition of the Middle East is constructed as
an ‘imagined geography’, establishing an analytical link between Said’s critique of
Orientalism and the ES perspective. The third part explores the ‘institutional distinctiveness’ of the Middle East in order to assess whether or not there is a ‘regional interstate
society’. Here I focus on primarily on the state, sovereignty and nationalism, supported by
secondary institutions, and a common culture and civilizational identity; all are crucial
social forces that mutually constitute the structure of a ‘regional interstate society’.
Eurocentrism IR and the study of the Middle East
Since Samir Amin proposed a systemic critique of ‘ideological deformations’ of world
history that views European culture and modernity as pre-eminent, Eurocentrism has
become a radical mode of thought (Amin [1988] 2011, 9). A Eurocentric view of world
puts the dominant West at the centre and, therefore, tacitly relegates ‘the rest of the world
to subordinate positions’ (Göl 2014, 34). It seems that ‘Eurocentrism is expressed in
practically all areas of social thought’ (Amin [1988] 2011, 255). As Wallerstein further
argues (1997, 94), Eurocentrism is ‘a hydra-headed monster and has many avatars’ that
has expressed itself in social science in the following ways: ‘1) its historiography, 2) the
parochiality of its universalism, 3) its assumptions about (Western) civilisation, 4) its
Orientalism, and 5) its attempts to impose the theory of progress’. In a similar manner, IR
has also been Eurocentric throughout its disciplinary history, including the ES (though the
latter with some important qualifications). In the case of the Middle East, it is crucial to
separate Eurocentrism from Orientalism.
The critique of Orientalism and Middle Eastern ‘exceptionalism’
While Eurocentrism in IR legitimates the images and dominant power position of Europe
as rational, secular, sovereign states and democratic societies, Orientalism has specific
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implications for the study of the Middle East. H. A. R. Gibb is one of the leading figures
in ‘modern Anglo-American Islamic studies, who preferred to call himself an Orientalist
rather than an Arabist’. Gibb could use ‘the ugly neologism “area study” for Orientalism
as a way of showing that area studies and Orientalism after all were interchangeable
geographical titles’ (Said [1978] 1993, 53). Although Said does not emphasize it, the term
‘Arabist’ has also produced negative connotations: it generates an image of a politically
unified community based on Arab culture and identity, which arguably interpreted Arabs
within a single social structure centred around an indivisible monolithic Islam that is still
considered a reality. Moreover, this doctrine has consistently ignored the non-Arab
civilizations (Persian and Turkish) within its construct of the region. It is rather disheartening to see that some still believe a vision of a monolithic Islam, shaped by only Arab
culture, and without noticeable consideration of Turkey or Iran. Any astute scholar of
Middle Eastern studies knows that there is no single Islam. In fact, ‘Islam has become
nationalized, producing as many Islams as there are countries with Muslim majorities’
even among Arab states and societies (Piscatori 1984, 313). Nevertheless, the general
attitude towards downgrading area and regional studies in the hierarchy of disciplines
‘ingenuously belies a much more interesting relationship between knowledge and geography’, which is particularly relevant to the study of the Middle East in IR (Said [1978]
1993, 53). During the past few decades, there have been new attempts to include ‘regional
transformation’ in international relations theory, but their concern is still how IR theories
can be applied ‘rather than try to understand other regions’ (Paul 2012; Hurrell 2007,
133). Hence, the Anglo-American theories of IR should suffice to be applied to different
regional contexts despite their socio-economic, political and cultural differences.
For example, in the case of the ES, the European International Society (EIS) of states
became global with universal membership by expanding to other parts of the world
(Zhang 2015, 360). Furthermore, the gradual transformation of EIS into a global one
led to the uneven development of international society, within which some parts of ‘the
contemporary global system have more developed international societies than others’ by
highlighting regional differences (Pourchot and Stivachtis 2014, 71–2). While there is
‘nothing in English School’s classical literature stands against a regional approach to
international society’, its implicit emphasis on excessive universalism has prevented it
from engaging in the complexity of regional and local histories (Buzan and Zhang 2014).
Within ES application to the Middle East, this lack of engagement with local/regional
histories is intertwined with Orientalist views of Islam. These views do not delve into the
questions of how local culture and social conditions adapt, change or resist once they
interact with European institutions, norms and values. They implicitly overlook the
existence of local agency during the expansion of the EIS, as evident in Ottoman–
European affairs.
From a historical perspective, ‘the expansion of international society’ is seen ‘as a
process, coinciding more or less with the spread of European diplomatic, political and legal
norms across the world through modern times, and culminating, to a certain degree itself, in
global acceptance of such norms’ (Halliday 2009, 3). Moreover, ES ‘scholars have tended to
see the expansion of society as a progressive development, [and] they have not adequately
investigated the role of imperialism in this process’ (Suzuki 2009, 17). The acceptance of
European norms was not always voluntary, but sometimes indirectly coercive and a subjugating process. The result was contentious for non-European entities – i.e. the Ottoman
Empire, Japan and China in the late nineteenth century. When these non-Western empires
encountered the EIS, they were implicitly subjugated to the civilizational and normative
power of a society of states. Something altogether different than the European example in
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their cultural and civilizational contexts, and therefore, disqualified as alien and inadequate.
As a result of subjugating processes, they had to adjust their differences to European
modernity and an assumed cultural homogeneity. This can also be interpreted as an early
manifestation of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Tomlinson 1991) that neither IR nor the ES scholars
have paid attention to until very recently (see Hobson 2004; Keene 2002). In other words,
the classical expansion story does not pay sufficient attention to the question of local agency
at the regional level in terms of adaptation, contestation and localization of norms and
institutions of Western-global international society (Zhang 2015, 361).
Most ES scholars agree that the institutions of international society had their origins
within the European civilization, but some disagree that their expansions to the nonWestern worlds created a multicultural global society (Linklater and Suganami 2006,
74–5). Among later scholars of the ES, there has been not only a growing awareness of
the Eurocentric nature of the expansion of international society but also a search for its
universal and global character from a critical perspective. Bull and Watson previously
argued that the EIS of the nineteenth century had cultural homogeneity, while the global
international society of the late twentieth century became culturally heterogonous.
However, for the contemporary ES scholar, a culturally heterogeneous and global society
can no longer be defined by only its homogenous European civilizational origin and
common identity.
Among the ES scholars, Hedley Bull must be credited for particularly engaging with
the ‘revolt against the West’, highlighting the contradictions in a wider pre-9/11 political
conjuncture. Bull argues that Western dominance was not without its challengers, which
initiated revolt and resistance against Western civilizations’ values and institutions. While
Bull acknowledged how the historical processes of European expansion, with its implications for power and hegemony encountered non-European civilizations, he also questioned why this expansion encountered the process of resistance. Yet, he failed to engage
with the idea of accommodation and adaptation of civilizations and cultures at local and
regional levels. The Ottoman Empire’s encounter with expanding EIS is important to
assess how Western values and institutions were adapted, accommodated, changed or
resisted in a Muslim context. This requires a critical interrogation of the complex interplay
between global and regional international societies and a revision of the expansion of
international society thesis: ‘instead of presuming five or so separate regional international
societies in the early modern period as stated by, for instance Bull and Watson, one needs
to be more cautious and acknowledge the already existing bonds between the regional
societies of Europe, the Middle East, India and China in the Old World’ (Yurdusev 2009,
91; Göl 2014, 51).
The added value of the ES: ‘revolt against the West’
From a historical perspective, Hedley Bull’s critique of the expansion of international
society is linked to the dominance of European, and more correctly Western powers after
the Second World War. As introduced with reference to the Ottomans, Japan and China,
these non-Western political communities were admitted to the EIS on the condition of
meeting the criteria for membership laid down by the founding members of a so-called
‘universal’ international society. One can easily assume, as Bull does, that the European/
Western powers claimed their power and influence over the others not only in economic,
military, cultural and intellectual terms but also in the rules and institutions of international society. Therefore, the revolt against the West had its origins in the nineteenth
century and became powerful enough to challenge the system in the twentieth century
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(Bull 1984a, 217). Within Bull’s classification of the revolt against Western dominance,
there were ‘five phases or themes’ that implicitly recognize the role of local agency and
history.
The first revolt was shaped by the struggle for equal sovereignty, which implied the
rights of states to sovereign equality irrespective of their European or Christian characters.
The second revolt was determined by the struggle for anti-colonialism as part of Asian,
African, Caribbean and Pacific peoples for formal political independence of Western –
European and American – colonial rule. Third was the ‘struggle for racial equality or more
accurately the struggle of non-white states and peoples against white supremacism’. The
fourth revolt was the struggle for economic justice, and finally, the struggle for ‘cultural
liberation’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 220–222).
There are three important implications of Bull’s arguments: first, the ES has had a
tradition of engaging with non-European struggles and the rise of local agency much
earlier than the orthodox IR theories. The ES approach, involving a detailed historical and
sociological perspective on the expansion of international society, allows for a questioning
of Western dominance and values. For Bull, the rise of Islamic, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalisms demonstrated the reassertion of the traditional and indigenous cultural rights
of non-Western peoples that ‘has raised the question whether what has been widely
interpreted as a revolt against Western dominance carried out in the name of Western
values, is not a revolt against Western values as such’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 223). In
effect, the expansion of international society and revolt against the West draw the ES
scholars’ attention to new and important issues.
From both historical and analytical perspectives, ‘there is no one “Western” system or
legacy’ (Halliday 2009, 12). If Western values, norms and institutions are diverse and
contradictory, the revolt and resistance against them must be questioned on the basis of
being both diverse and contradictory too. Specifically, resistance and revolutions in the
Middle East – Palestine since the 1960s, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iraq after 2003,
Libya and Syria since 2011 and the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and al-Sham (ISIS) in
2014 – all are dominantly perceived as the rejection of regional arrangements facilitated
by the West. While the historical and modern international relations of the Middle East
have no shortage of resistance movements, their internal grievances and controversies
need to be contextualized with reference to a ‘revolt against the imposition of external
powers’ (Halliday 2009, 18). Neither the legacy of European colonialism in the nineteenth
and the twentieth centuries, nor the rise American hegemony and resistance in the twentyfirst century should be left out from any analysis (Krishna 2009). For the same reason,
neither should be held solely responsible for all problems and controversies in the Middle
East, at least not without analysing the domestic conditions of each state that gave rise to
authoritarian regimes.
Second, as Bull himself summarizes succinctly, revolt against the West was not about the
rejection of Western values. It was against Western dominance, which indicated the struggles
of non-Western states, nations, races, peoples and cultures for equal rights such as sovereignty, self-determination, equality, economic justice and cultural autonomy. ‘These rights
are today clearly spelt out in conventions having the force of law, even though in many cases
they are not enjoyed in practice and no consensus exists about their meaning and interpretation’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 227). National liberation and decolonization movements
highlighted the variety of political, social and cultural differences in the non-Western worlds
as the history of the twentieth century progressed. Among Asian, African and other nonWestern peoples, the Muslim majority societies have attracted special attention due to the rise
of so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’ that unfolded after the 9/11 attacks, which has raised a similar
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question to which Bull was quoted earlier: is Islamic fundamentalism’s ‘revolt against the
West’ in fact against Western values? Or, is this a new wave of struggle against the Western
dominance as presented in the form of US hegemony? Bull concludes that ‘as Asian, African
and other non-Western peoples have become stronger relative to the Western powers, they
have become freer to adopt a different rhetoric that sets Western values aside, or at all events
place different interpretation upon them’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 224). While this development is someone evident, Bull however fails to account for the imperialist nature of
international society that persistently produce new hegemons that harvest violence and
subjugation (Halliday 2009, 18).
Third, the expansion of international society and revolt against the West needs to be more
accurately analysed as resulting from competing state interests, rather than cultural differences
between the West and Islam, as infamously claimed by Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’
thesis (Huntington 1993). In the post-9/11 era, it has become clear that the West can no longer
sustain its supremacy over other non-Western peoples and cultures. In the case of the Middle
East, there is enough evidence of the imposition of values – i.e. modernization and liberal
democracy promotion – by the more powerful on less powerful states. The rise of nationalism,
revolution, opposition and resistance can be interpreted as the new forms of counter-hegemonic ideas and practices to proclaim indigenous entitlement: Arab, Palestinian, Kurdish and
Turkish nationalists all have used the core ideas of liberation and self-determination created by
Western discourses and practices to demand sovereignty and justice (Halliday 2009, 21). As
Bull rightly predicted, ‘revolt against the West’ has not been necessarily a ‘revolt against
Western values as such’. But is this also a valid argument in the case of Muslim societies in
the post-9/11 period? The crux of this debate is to what extent a ‘regional interstate society’ in
the Middle East can evolve? Does it evolve in opposition to a global one dominated by the
West? Or, do the regional and the global evolve together and mutually? Do the imposition of
Western norms, values and institutions by the hegemonic global power – the US – negate the
emergence of a regional international society in the Middle East? In search of answers to these
questions, the ES approach is applied to the Middle East in the next section.
The English School and the Middle East as an ‘imagined geography’
The ES can contribute to Middle Eastern studies from three perspectives: analytical,
historical and definitional (Buzan and Gonzales-Pelaez 2009, 243). From a historical
perspective, the expansion of international society to include the Ottoman Empire offers
three analytical insights to explain the European relations with the Middle East as an
‘imagined geography’: first, the Ottoman Empire, due to its different culture and religion
– Islam – was the first ‘other’ of EIS; second, the increasingly ‘modernized’ Ottoman
Empire in the late nineteenth century ‘performed a kind of transmitter role in the Middle
East’; third, the formation of the modern Middle East cannot be explained without the
complex interaction between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the expansion of EIS
(Yurdusev 2009, 79). The emphasis on the changing role of the Ottoman Empire from
being an ‘other’, to a ‘transmitter’ between Europe and the Middle East, is a departure
point to understand the nature of relations between regional and international societies.
The Ottoman Empire as transmitter between Europe and the Middle East
The long history of Ottoman–European relations reflects a double-edged legacy on the
emergence of a regional international society in the Middle East. As highlighted earlier,
whether or not there is a regional international society in the Middle East is contentious
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because it is relative to what constitutes the social structure of international societies. In
the classic ES conceptualization, it is argued that ‘the tributary system is also an articulation of the historical existence of international society in East Asia with its own social
structure and a particular set of institutions that help define norms of acceptable and
legitimate state behaviour’ (Zhang 2015, 362). Historically, some of the key European
institutions that constitute an international society, such as diplomacy, international law, a
capitalist market, nationalism and war, can be traced back within the Middle East.
There is historical evidence that ‘the Ottoman Empire was integrated through the
operation of a redistribute-tributary network’ and was an integral part of the world
economy (Kasaba 1988, 3). From this perspective, the Ottoman tributary system indicates a historically embedded social structure in the Middle East that constitutes an
international society with its particular set of institutions. The Ottoman system also
demonstrated the functioning of diplomacy, nationalism and war prior to its incorporation into world capitalist economy and European international law in the nineteenth
century (Adanir 2005). There is a strong case for calling the Middle East a regional
international society due to ‘institutional distinctiveness’ as defined by its primary
institutions – state, nationalism and sovereignty – and secondary institutions – common
culture and identity-based regional organizations (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009), as
will be identified later.
Among the mainstream IR theories, ES scholars offer critical readings of European
history, proposing that ‘the Ottoman Turkish Empire that survived into the twentieth
century’ had the most remarkable impact on the ‘European system and the evolution of
international society’ (Watson 1992, 116). In its earliest years, the Ottoman Empire
played a decisive role in two important movements in Europe, ‘the Protestant
Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which together with the
Renaissance, transformed European society and led ultimately to the creation of an
international society in Europe’s image’ (Naff 1984,145). In particular, the image of
rational, secular and sovereign states in Europe disqualified the Ottoman system as alien
and inadequate. As Neumann and Welsh (1991) argued, the Islamic Ottoman Empire
remained the ‘other’ in the definition of European identity. The ‘otherness’ of the
Ottomans was shaped by its religious identity and culture as opposed to Christianity.
Both Bull and Watson emphasized that the militarily powerful Ottoman Empire was not
only the historic enemy of Christendom but also a non-European entity, due to its
different culture, religion and race that contributed towards constructing a European
‘we’ and a ‘universal international society’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 427; Bull 1984b,
117). The Sublime Porte – Bab-I Ali – was a major actor in the European states system,
but never part of the EIS (Göl 2014, 34). The Islamic identity of the Ottoman Empire
was not confined to cultural and societal spheres, but seen as an essential part of state
relations as claimed by the early scholars of ES.
For the early ES, however, the ‘Ottoman theories of state and government [are]
derived from the Muslim concept that God is the source of all authority and law, that
government exists to enable the community of believers [Muslim umma] to fulfill its
obligation to God. The community, and the state, constitutes the basic Muslim polity,
transcending all boundaries’ (Naff 1984, 143). Similarly, Naff’s contemporaries Buzan
and Little argue that the ‘contradiction between religion and politics in the Islamic world
blocked its path to modernization; while it was socially cohesive it was politically
incoherent, lacking both boundaries and well-rooted states’ (2000, 320–21). These negative interpretations of the relationship between Islam and state are, in fact, somewhat
‘arbitrary’ views of ‘modernization’ and ‘states’, in the sense that Said developed in
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Orientalism (Said [1978] 1993). What accepted as a modern and European state has
established certain standards as international and universal practice. While there may be
‘such things as positive history and geography which in Europe and the US have
impressive achievement to point to’ (Said [1978] 1993, 55), the Islamic world has
never been regarded as part of this progressive story. Despite the golden age of the
Muslim world in astronomy, medicine and mathematics, Islamic knowledge has hardly
ever been regarded as having reached the same level of European science and rationality.
The different paths to progress in Muslim societies have been disqualified, rendered as
outside of the European model.
Among Orientalist scholars, H. A. Gibbon was the first Western scholar to engage
with the origins of state in the Middle East. Following him, other scholars such as
Houtsma, Huart, Marquart, Massignon and Mordtmann all emphasized ‘the “oriental”
nature of the Ottomans and accepted the essentially Turco-Muslim identity of the
founders of the state’ (Kafadar 1995, 32–5). However, as the contemporary studies
of Ottoman history argue, ‘the rise of the Ottoman state had to be studied against the
background of centuries of warfare, cultural transformation, acculturation, and the
settlement of Muslims and Turks in medieval Anatolia’ (Kafadar 1995, 36–7). In the
case of the Ottomans, the state was not established simply on the principle of Islam
and the Shari’a (Islamic Law), but on the legacies of political institutions of earlier
empires – Roman, Byzantium, Persian – that ruled between Europe and Asia Minor.
The Ottomans produced a synthesis of Western political reason and Eastern philosophical views of the purpose of state, within which Islam was protected and promoted,
largely by the existence of a strong empire. For the Ottoman historian Mustafa Naima
(1655–1716), who wrote The Annals of the Empire between 1591–1659 of the
Christian Era, argued that the main purpose of the state was ‘(1) to organize the
exploitation of the wealth belonging to the ruler, (2) provide for the expansion and
defence of this wealth, (3) keep order, and (4) promote Islam, while permitting the
practice of other religions with the ruler’s dominions’ (Shaw 1976, 112), objectives
shared by Europe’s developing states.
The evolution of the Ottoman state from a small principality in Anatolia to an
Islamic imperial power stretching to three continents for 600 years proves the complexity of its socio-economic, political and military structures. By reducing the structure of
the Ottoman state to Islam, one cannot explain why an ‘Oriental’ empire maintained its
internal cohesion over heterogeneous religious and cultural groups – i.e. Muslim and
non-Muslim millets – with such historical resilience. This probably explains why the
Sublime Porte was the first and only Islamic entity to be ‘admitted’ to EIS in midnineteenth century (Bull and Watson 1984, 427). Neither its specific geo-cultural
existence in between Europe and Asia nor the geopolitical legacies of Byzantium
and Persian Empires in this geographical space should be ignored. As the transformation of the Islamic Ottoman Empire into a modern Turkish nation state at the beginning
of the twentieth century demonstrates, Islam has been nationalized and differentiated
from its multifaceted Arab successors. The historical legacy of the state as an institution in the Turkish context proves that contemporary challenges that Arab societies are
facing today cannot be simply reduced to Islam’s rejection of the state as a Western
concept in the modern Middle East. The correlations between Orientalist views of
Islam and the so-called rejection of the Western model of the state can be analysed
through the construction of the Middle East as ‘imagined geography’, which I turn to
next.
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Defining the Middle East
The Middle East is an ‘imagined geography’ that has no meaning unless one locates it inbetween the West and the East. Defining the Middle East as ‘middle’ was a reflection of
the mid-nineteenth-century British colonial strategies that imagined the East as middle,
near and far (Hanafi 1998, 1–9). Alfred Mahan first coined the term in 1902, ‘to define the
maritime and adjacent land area between European and British India’ (Adelson 1994, 22;
Halliday 2009, 14). By analogy with Alfred Mahan’s use of the great landmasses of the
world in particular on the Central Asian ‘heartland’ and the Far East, the Middle East
referred to the land between Arabia and India as ‘imaginary geography’.
As Davison has argued, ‘the fact remains that no one knows where the Middle East is,
although many claim to know’ (1960, 1). Given the fact the Ottoman Empire was the
representative of Muslims in the East, the ‘middle’ east was a meaningless term from the
position of the Sublime Porte. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Arab
land of the Empire was divided into different sanjacks (districts) and eyalets (provinces),
which were replaced by vilayets (wilayah in Arabic – provinces) in 1867 and the number
of vilayets kept changing depending on the annexation of territories (Yurdusev 2009, 82).
In 1876, the first Ottoman Constitution – Kanun-i Esasi – (article 1) defined the Empire as
a ‘territorial unit’ in the European sense. Therefore, the Ottoman state structure was
familiar with the principle of ‘territoriality’, which found its way into the late Ottoman
vilayet organization of the Middle East. The Arab land under the Ottoman rule was
divided into nine major vilayets in 1905: Hedjaz, Yemen, Basra, Baghdad, Mosul,
Haleb, Souriya (Syria), Beyrout (Beirut) and Tripoli (Heidborn 1908, 7–8).
In the twentieth century, the ‘Middle East’ was imagined as an integral part of
Eurocentric and Orientalist worldviews. The images and (mis)representations of the
‘East’, ‘Orient’ or ‘Islamic world’ not only characterized the Middle East, which is
consigned to the category of ‘non-Western’ or ‘the rest of the world’ but also imagined
a region ‘peopled by “Others” that can be labeled as “uncivilized”, “traditional”, “irrational”, and “violent”, much as they were centuries ago’ (Said [1978] 1993, 1997; Göl
2010, 2). Consequently, the Middle East remains to be a ‘traditional’, ‘uncivilized’,
‘violent’ and ‘unique’ region in Western minds. These images have contributed towards
producing its regional ‘exceptionalism’.
When compared to other regions, the Middle East is often seen as ‘unique’, ‘based on
the implicit assumption that Islam – [despite] all its complexities, contradictions, and
cultural differences, as well as different political trajectories – is monolithic and homogenous, and that Islam is the primary referent’ in politics (Göl 2010, 3). Hence, a
homogenous Islam is incompatible with the idea of sovereign states and nationalism
based on a division among ethnic groups. It is Islam that makes the Middle East ‘unique’
in Western minds. But like other postcolonial regions, there is nothing ‘unique’ about the
Middle East, for the following reasons: first, the arbitrary imposition of boundaries by
colonial structures has never reflected the complexity of identities at ethnic, tribal and
national levels. Second, the lack of an organic relationship between ‘citizens’ and the state
has weakened the loyalties of certain minorities and marginalized groups, and has
remained continuously present in Middle East states. Third, the loose relations between
states and societies have persistently sustained sub- and/or supra-state identities and
loyalties that fostered irredentist movements in modern politics.
The construction of the Middle East as an ‘imagined geography’ by European colonial
powers shows how the expansion of imperialism and the EIS not only gave the Middle East
its modern name but also its key institutions, the state and the ideology of nationalism. There
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is a case for the argument that a ‘regional interstate society’ exists in the Middle East despite
its ‘institutional distinctiveness’ (Buzan 2004, 161–204; Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009,
241). While accepting the existence of differences between regional and international
societies, ES scholars need to be ‘more aware of the distinction between the Western core
of international society and its global projection, and what is actually happening in the
periphery’ (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009, 240), as is the case within the Middle East.
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International Society and the ‘institutional distinctiveness’ of the Middle East
A better understanding of the ‘interplay between regional and global levels’ is immanent
for two reasons: on the one hand, ‘[i]nternational society at the global level is almost
inevitably thin, but as most strongly shown by the EU, regional developments may well
be thicker’. On the other hand, the ‘regional manifestations of international social
structure’ can no longer be ‘marginalized and resisted’ (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez
2009, 30). However, emphasizing the example of the EU as a successful regional
international society reaffirms Eurocentric assumptions unless it is tested in geographies
outside European zone. The Middle East as a regional context offers both opportunities
and challenges to this aim by questioning key institutions of international societies.
(a) The primary institutions of the Middle Eastern ‘regional interstate society’: state,
nationalism and sovereignty, which are compared and contrasted to the primary
institution at the global level – state sovereignty, diplomacy, territoriality, great
power management, war, nationalism, equality of people, the market and environmental stewardship (Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009, 94–115).
(b) The secondary institutions of the Middle Eastern ‘regional interstate society’,
which stem from the imperative generated by particular above-mentioned primary
institutions: the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Arab
Cooperation Council (ACC), the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), the Organisation
of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) and the Organisation of the
Islamic Conference (OIC) (Murden 2009, 125–130).
In fact, even before the expansion of the European model, the state as an institution has
dominated the history of the Middle East, and therefore requires a more historically
nuanced interpretation than the essentialist views of Islam and the state.
The state and nationalism
According to Adda Bozeman, the sovereign state as the core concept of the international
system is ‘critically embattled everywhere’; however, most notably within the Middle East
and Africa (1984, 405). In the case of the Muslim societies, it is commonly assumed that
the rejection of the state has resulted in an attempt to ‘reject the western concept of a
community of states in favour of traditional Islamic concepts’, as described in the
Expansion of International Society (Bozeman 1984, 405; Bull and Watson 1984).
However, as discussed with reference to the Ottoman Empire, the Turks adapted and
accommodated to the requirements of EIS differently than other Muslim societies. There
is no monolithic Islam that rejects the modern concept of state, but different political
trajectories of the state within various Arab, Persian and Turkish paths.
Within the modern Middle East, there were four key processes which shaped contemporary politics: first, the process of state formation as administrative and coercive
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political actor; second, the creation of national identities; third, secularization; and fourth,
growing resistance to the colonial external and regional powers, in the form of ethnonationalist and Islamic movements (Halliday 2005, 86–9). The process of state formation
followed a different path in the Arab world after the end of British and French colonialism. First, Arab peoples and states gained independence at different stages of decolonization in the Middle East (Bahrain in 1971, Iraq in 1958, Jordan 1946, Kuwait in 1961,
Lebanon in 1943, Oman and Qatar in 1971, Palestine in 1988, Saudi Arabia in 1932,
Syria in 1946, United Arab Emirates in 1971 and Yemen – South Yemen in 1967 and the
unification in 1990). Second, while the state has faced challenges in the form of panArabism and pan-Islamism, it still remains the main actor in the Middle East. The uneven
development of the ‘nation’, the ‘state’ and the ‘nation state’ does not mean that these are
artificial constructs are incompatible with the Middle East. The division of humanity into
nation states was not a natural process in Europe either. Historically, in the newly defined
modern Middle East there are some states, i.e. Iran, Yemen and Morocco, that could be
traced back within the pre-Ottoman and precolonial period. An accurate and sensitive
reading of the state in Middle Eastern history should combine the expansion of European
colonialism and the rise of nationalism as an ideology.
Like many other postcolonial regions, nationalism has manifested itself in two major
forms in the Middle East: first, the nationalism of particular ethnic groups and individual
states (including Arabs and non-Arabs); second, the cultural form of the Arab nationalism
that transcends individual state identities to claim a collective identity and regional unity –
i.e. pan-Arabism. First, the idea of Arab nationalism needs to be understood from a
historical perspective, within which one can identify a dual function: on the one hand,
the Arabs were united under the ideology of Arab nationalism against the first colonial
power in the region – the Ottoman Empire – and independence prevailed in the form of
the Arab Revolt against the Turkish yoke. On the other hand, the idea of Arab nationalism
turned itself into the movements of self-determination after the disintegration of the
Ottoman Empire. As Hourani argues, the widespread form of nationalism was territorial
in the Middle East between the two World Wars, and only later became predominantly
ethnic (1981, 86). Second, pan-Arabism was an important force of resistance during the
anti-colonial movements in the 1950s and 1960s. There is no doubt that ‘pan-Arabism, by
its nature, aspired to the utmost Arab unity, threatening the sovereignty of the new fragile
borders’ (Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009, 94). But in contrast, pan-Arabism strengthened the
principle of sovereignty because gaining independence from colonial powers was a
necessary step towards statehood, after which Arab unification would have followed.
The pan-Arab ideal has never been achieved, but the principle of sovereignty secured its
place in the region after pan-Arabism. When ‘the Charter of the League of Arab states
prioritized the respect for sovereignty’ in 1945, it was institutionalized as much as with
regard to their European counterparts in international society (Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009, 94).
In the post–Second World War history of the Middle East, the creation of Israel as a
Jewish state at the expense of indigenous Arabs – Palestinians – gave a new meaning to
the rise of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism under Nasser’s leadership.
It is evident that nationalism has functioned during the process of state formation and
identity construction in the Middle East in comparable way to other regions. For the critics
of Islam, there can be no separation between religion and nationalism in Muslim societies.
In this context, one can argue that ‘Islamist nationalism’ is the third form of nationalism
within the Middle East (Yurdusev 2009, 87). In particular, Islam does not accept ethnic
divisions, and therefore acts as nationalism because of the unitary nature of the Muslim
community (umma) (Göl 2005, 115). The centuries-old national aspirations of two
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indigenous stateless ethnic groups in the Middle East are two strong examples which
prove these claims wrong: the continuous national struggles of Palestinians and Kurds
demonstrate that modern nationalism is persistent in the Middle East. The ideology of
pan-Islamism has been a historically strong advocate of a unitary Muslim community,
supporting the claims regarding ‘Islamist nationalism’. However, in addition to separate
nationalisms, the rise of pan-Arabism as opposed to pan-Islamism suggests that we should
rethink the true nature of ‘Islamist nationalism’. More importantly, the clash of pan versus
individual state identities and loyalties further questions the role of identity in the Middle
East.
Turkish, Iranian and Arab states have been organized around the principles of
sovereignty, nationality and territoriality that have survived through to the twenty-first
century. Pan-ideologies – pan-Ottomanism, pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism – were historically tested and failed to unite the Muslim peoples of the East at the end of the First
World War (Göl 2013, 61–3). In the twentieth century, ‘two transnational ideas – panArabism and pan-Islamism – continued to cast a shadow over the region, but they could
not stop the territorial state consolidating its own reality’ (Murden 2009,137). The
challenges stemming from pan-ideologies to Western values and institutions have not
succeeded as of yet. In this context, the institutions of the state, sovereignty and nationalism not only constitute the social structure of Middle Eastern order but also relate to the
common culture and identity as part of above-mentioned secondary institutions.
Common culture and identity
As highlighted by Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez (2009), the ‘secondary institutions’ of the
Middle Eastern interstate society indicate the existence of a common culture and identity.
Does having a civilizational identity (which was seen as an important requirement for
EIS) around Arab culture support the case for the Middle East as a ‘regional interstate
society’? It is true that none of the Arab-centred organizations – the Arab League, ACC,
AMU and OAPEC – has been as effective as the EU, and most are frequently regarded as
dysfunctional, ineffective and ‘dead letters’ that never rise beyond the rhetorical level.
While they underline the existence of a shared Arab identity and common culture, what
does the failure of these trans-state organizations indicate? Has the unity of Islam been
more powerful than the common culture of Arabs?
The pan-Islamic utopia has never withered away in the Middle East since its inception
in the late nineteenth century. Pan-Islam is seen as a mechanism for creating an international society of Muslims (umma). In the twentieth century, it was the Iranian Revolution
of 1979 that introduced Islam as a revolutionary force. Since then and the emergence of
what some call the ‘global jihadi network’, a popular view has developed that Islam is
irreconcilably opposed to an international society built on the peaceful coexistence and
cooperation of sovereign states (Hashmi 2009, 200). Because of Islam’s assumed incompatibility with Western values, it is often supposed that an international society of
Muslims will conflict with a universal international society, and one that would threaten
the development of an Islamic subsystem. As highlighted earlier, these claims are based
on the essentialist views of a monolithic Islam, which does not reflect the realities of
various Muslim societies. As students of Middle Eastern politics know, there is enough
historical evidence that ‘pan-Islam has proven no more effective than pan-Arabism in
mobilizing elites and masses to create alternative to the nation state’ (Hashmi 2009, 199).
In particular, the OIC can be seen as the formal embodiment of pan-Islam at the interstate
level today. However, the ‘OIC’s commitment to the principles of the UN Charter and
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international law found in its first charter and reaffirmed in its second is more than mere
rhetoric’ (Hashmi 2009, 200). Despite the promises of pan-Islam, the OIC has never
reached the success of the EU as an effective organization but it still functions as a
secondary institution to promote the development of an international society of Muslims.
In the twenty-first century, the notion of pan-Islam gained a controversial meaning
when the ISIS claimed the establishment of a transnational ‘Islamic State’ – the Caliphate
– by replacing existing boundaries between various states in the Middle East. Contrary to
popular perception in Western societies, nobody knows what an Islamic State is. There are
already two competing models: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia. Despite their claims, the nation state based on the European model ‘has still
proven remarkably adaptable and resilient. Unable to achieve a clear idea of what
constitutes an Islamic alternative to the nation-state or how to bring it about, advocates
of pan-Islam seem by and large reconciled for the time being to symbolic, pluralist
manifestations’ (Hashmi 2009, 200). They continue to do so as long as the causes of
‘revolt against the West’ are sustained in the region. The idea of an Islamic State will
remain to be an alternative lure if current conflicts and grievances continue weakening the
coercive machinery of modern states, and therefore intensifying the existing political
vacuum in the Middle East.
The failure of Arab trans-state organizations can be explained by two related regional
and international conditions: first, the Middle East system is based on a ‘fragmented core’
consisted of Arab states and a ‘periphery of more or less hostile stronger and more modern
non-Arab states (Iran, Turkey and Israel)’ (Hinnebush 2009, 204). However, both Arab
and non-Arab states are tied together by conflicts and competitions within a ‘regional
security complex’ that constitute ‘the thinnest’ of regional international societies (Buzan
and Wæver 2003, 189; Hinnebush 2009, 204). Second, the ‘fragmented core’ has been
further weakened by the lack of a ‘regional hegemon’ that led to regional rivalries among
Arab states – Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and their non-Arab challengers, Iran and
Turkey. The causes of the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s and the Gulf Wars in the 1990s are
better explained within this context. Similarly, the unfolding events and conflicts in the
post-Saddam, post-Qaddafi and post-Mubarak era indicate not only the rise of an anarchical regional society but also the continued and somewhat intensified search for a
hegemon. Unlike other regions organized around a powerful centre – i.e. China-centred
East Asia or Japan-centred Asia – there is neither an Egypt-centred nor an Iran- or Turkeycentred Middle East. The lack of a regional hegemon has produced a power vacuum that
has been manipulated by the rise of violent resistance movements and terrorist organizations – i.e. Al-Qaida and the ISIS – in current affairs.
Concluding remarks
This article contributes towards a growing critique of Eurocentrism in IR by challenging
the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Middle East, where the lack of regional international society is
assumed. The main argument of this article is that the Middle East is in fact a ‘regional
interstate society’. It locates the Middle East without losing its ‘institutional distinctiveness’ within the studies of IR and ES on three dimensions. First, the historical analysis of
Ottoman–European relations demonstrates how the state system with its key institutions
evolved in the Middle East. Second, the resilience of the state, sovereignty and nationalism in the region disprove Islam’s assumed incompatibility with modern state and global
international society. Third, international societies are bound together by culturally and
historically contingent values that define the civilizational identities reciprocally. In the
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Middle Eastern context, the ideas of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism, despite their failure,
have strongly supported the existence of a common culture and civilizational identity as
one of the main requirements of a regional international society.
The added value of this article’s general findings is as follows: first, the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Middle East that prevents the emergence of a regional international society is
historically questioned. The classical expansion story of EIS pays insufficient attention to
the existence of local agency, even when accounting for Bull’s notion of the ‘revolt
against the West’ in terms of adaptation, accommodation and resistance to norms and
institutions of global international society. Second, when it comes to understanding the
relationship between the Middle Eastern regional and Western-global international societies, it is unlikely to find any regional differentiation at all other than arising from
resistance against the legitimacy of external intrusions. Third, the recognition of an
uneven progress of regional international societies does not mean that a global international society does not exist. On the contrary, it shows that the two mutually evolve as part
of accommodation and resistance that offers a thicker analysis of world affairs. Finally, the
Middle East will continue to be a litmus test of whether or not a truly global international
society is possible. Within the regionally uneven and globally combined development, the
Middle East is inextricably connected to Western-global international society and continues to challenge how the global society should allow the regional society to develop
despite its civilizational differences.
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