Part Five. New Security and Reordering the Middle East at the Thrn of the Century: The New Challenges

Transcription

1 Part Five New Security and Reordering the Middle East at the Thrn of the Century: The New Challenges

2 The Vision of The New Middle East' 189 Introduction The peace process holds the promise for a prosperous New Middle East. The International Peace Conference, Madrid 1991, held in the aftermath of the Gulf War failed to achieve a concrete mechanism for the needed conflict resolution. In contrast, the Oslo Declaration of Principles in 1993 seemed to fulfil the promise of peace and to deliver the goods needed for meeting the existing expectations. It is true, the violence did not abate; there were acts of terrorism on both sides. Nevertheless, the two statecentred conflicts have come to an end: superpower rivalry on the international level, and the Arab-Israeli conflict on the regional level. This change did not mean the end of conflict in the Middle East, but rather the end of the possibility of an escalation to an interstate war. The new changes also led to a shift from the international interstate level to domestic conflict. This shift underlies the new patterns of security. In short, interstate wars in the Middle East seem to belong to a past era. There will be no further Arab-Israeli wars, but wars of the new kind. It is unfortunate that the terrorist acts of Palestinian suicide bombers between 24 February and 4 March 1996 indirectly contributed to weakening the Israeli Labour Party then in office and resulted in bringing a new Likud government to power. The new Prime Minister Netanyahu, elected on 30 May 1996, has stalled the peace process. On 25 and 26 September 1996 violence flared, and in March 1997 the Har Homa settlements in Arab East Jerusalem heated up the conflict. The Economist aptly described the situation in the following manner: '[the] vaunted New Middle East seems a distant memory. In the North, Israel and Syria have been reinforcing their frontline troops, as tension rises in both Lebanon and the Golan Heights. In the South, Israel and Egypt have been hurling insults at each other with a ferocity not equalled for years. To the East, relations with Jordan, until recently so warm, have sharply chilled.' (The Economist, 28 September 1996, p. 57) The situation led the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to warn Israel of a new Arab-Israeli war! His warning gives rise to the question: do these developments suggest that the theoretical framework of this new edition - pertaining to the cessation of interstate wars as the expression of regional conflict - is wrong? There is no doubt that the Egyptian President - using the rhetoric of war - wanted to put pressure on Israel to make her budge; Mubarak's goal has been to stop stalling the peace process. There is equally no doubt that the reference to a possible new Arab-Israeli war is to be qualified in terms of political

3 190 The New Challenges rhetoric. Neither Egypt nor any other Arab state will wage war against Israel. In this new Part Five I make an effort to help the reader to understand the post-bipolar Middle East at the end of a world-political era. Despite all changes, the Middle East, as defined and analysed in this volume, continues to be a regional state system and a part of the international system. The contention of a shift of focus in the military dimension of regional conflicts from interstate to non-state level does not overlook this very reality of the Middle East as a distinct regional state system. Nevertheless, the statehood of the existing states is very weak, a fact which explains their vulnerability and may be, I believe, a major domestic source of future conflict. State formation in terms of nation-building followed the dissolution of the Islamic order or caliphate of the Ottoman Empire. The hallmark of the new states lies in their apparent weakness both in terms of the achieved institutionalisation and the acquired legitimacy. This volatility derives from the fact that the history of this state system has been a history of war. From the previous chapters of this book we have learned that both the major Arab-Israeli wars involved the international bipolar system, and the related superpower rivalry were the grounds for defining the significance of the Middle East for international politics - of course aside from the oil issue. Two conflicts, one regional and the other international, gave the Middle Eastern state system its shape; a subsystem of the international system. These were the regional Arab-Israeli conflict and the global East West conflict. The two Gulf Wars, and 1991, have not only added a new dimension, they have also complicated the existing conflict formations in the Middle East. In addition they have drawn attention to the legally recognised, but actually fuzzy state boundaries, and the institutional weakness of the Middle Eastern states. In my work I address most of the Arab states as nominal nation-states because they lack the substance of national sovereignty. Other observers of the Middle Eastern scene have preferred to speak of 'tribes with national flags'. With the exception of Egypt and Morocco there is some truth in this description. Iraq is a case in point; there exists no Iraqi nation underpinned by a polity that corresponds with the nominally existing Iraqi state. Having argued that the bipolar superpower rivalry and the Arab-Israeli wars had given the Middle Eastern system its particular place in the international system, it must follow that the demise of both is significant for the region. The dissolution of the Soviet Empire, ending the role of an incomplete superpower in bipolar international politics, combined with the

4 The Vision of 'The New Middle East' 191 Oslo Peace Declaration indirectly ending the long history of Arab-Israeli wars, has changed the character of conflict in the politics of the Middle East. If the Palestinians make peace with Israel, then the Arab states have no legitimacy to wage wars against Israel any longer. Surely, both the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict had veiled the institutional weakness of the Middle Eastern nation-states. The disappearance of this veil therefore unleashes conflicts that are not new, but had hitherto been suppressed. This suppression took place under the cover of facing the external enemy on the one hand, and in the need of maintaining existing state formations due to the pressure of bipolar bloc politics on the other. In other words: domestic conflict comes to the fore giving international politics in the Middle East a new shape. Internal security moves to centre stage, and even interstate conflict becomes a function of domestic conflict. I therefore maintain that the primacy of interstate conflict leading to interstate war in the Middle East is a past phenomenon. The Gulf War in 1991 was the last interstate war in that region for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Middle Eastern states are still involved in partly ongoing 'wars', but these no longer follow the traditional Clausewitzian pattern of institutionalised interstate wars. The two Katyusha wars in South Lebanon, July 1993 and April 1996, can be referred to as being cases in point. The recent war in North Iraq in August 1996 and the ensuing inter Kurdish clashes are further evidence. Other examples are the domestic wars in Algeria and Sudan and the terrorism both in Egypt and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. It follows that the study of conflict and war in the Middle East needs to be adjusted to these changed conditions. The same applies to security studies hitherto preoccupied with the state as the sole actor in international politics. In a similar vein I argue that the focus on military issues being the foremost instrument. for stability and security should be phased out. Post-Cold War security studies focus on broader issues. The seminal argument touches on the nominal character of the Middle Eastern states, on their often very low degree of institutionalisation, and also on their equally weak legitimacy. Seen from this perspective, efforts at strengthening the statehood of these entities would be a pivotal contribution to peace and stability in the region. For this reason, Chapter 11 brings to the fore the issue of regional integration and its ever-changing dimensions. This chapter was written in the light of the Gulf War and its long-standing repercussions on international politics in the Middle East. I believe that a mutual respect of sovereignty among the existing - though nominal - states, if combined with regional cooperation within a larger

5 192 The New Challenges integration project, would not only diminish the likelihood of the escalation of given conflicts to war, but would also strengthen the statehood of the participating actors. Weak states are prone to destabilising conflicts, both domestic and international, whereas strong states can indulge themselves in peaceful conflict resolution. The other area pertinent to the study of conflict and war and addressed in Chapter 12 is national security. Every prudent and well-informed observer of the Middle Eastern scene would not deny the fact that the major challenge to the stability of Middle Eastern states is no longer an external threat posed by an adjacent state, but rather a threat stemming from internal conflict, be it ethnic (for example the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq) or religio-political (for example the underground groups called 'the Arab Afghans' in Egypt, Algeria and the Occupied Territories). In so arguing, I do not overlook the effort of Iran to export its 'Islamism' into the neighbouring states. However, the Iranian Threat is not a Clausewitzian source of interstate war but rather based on terrorist infiltration named 'the Iranian Connection' (O'Ballance). Again, we find ourselves in the field of 'New Security'. At issue is a threat of domestic fragmentation partly resulting from the crippling of legitimacy of the existing state. Iraq provides an outstanding example illustrating this pattern. The threat can be related either to political Islam, addressed as fundamentalism, or to ethnicity, or to a combination of the two, as is the case in Afghanistan (the Taliban being Islamic fundamentalists and belonging to the ethnic group of the Pashtun). In referring to this new pattern of conflict David Carment and Patrick James coined the formula 'wars in the midst of peace'. In spite of my familiarity with the political phenomenon of terrorism, my approach for studying political Islam is different from the one employed in the study of terrorism for instance by Edgar O'Ballance. My point of departure is the fact that the institution of the nation-state, as adopted in the Middle East in the course of state formation, is based on secular legitimacy, that is the separation of politics and religion. In this regard, religious fundamentalism in its Islamic shape, just as all other religious fundamentalisms, is a challenge to the legitimacy of the secular nation-state. In presenting an alternative divine order the ideology of political Islam in this manner poses a greater threat to the national security of the existing states than the terrorist groups could ever do. In my view, terrorism is only a random phenomenon of this larger conflict between the secular order of the nation-state and the alternative of a divine order vowed for. The outcome would basically be disorder, if the existing nation-states were destabilised and eventually crumbled under the new

6 The Vision of 'The New Middle East' 193 challenge. I know of no case where the claimed fundamentalist order works; more representative is the case of fundamentalist disorder in Afghanistan. Thus, conflicts between states exist in abundance in the Middle East, be this between Syria and Israel on the one hand or Syria and Turkey on the other, or between Iraq and Iran, or, similarly, between Algeria and Morocco. But none of these conflicts is likely to develop to a Clausewitzian interstate war due to the changes that have taken place in the international system. In the aftermath of the Cold War new issues are centre stage that compel the broadening of the concept of security: domestic conflict comes to the fore and apparently supplants interstate war. Regional dynamic continues to determine Middle Eastern conflicts, but the superpower rivalry as a pivotal dimension in the conflict has abated. This is the background behind the issues to be dealt with in the following chapters.