10 - The Middle East in international perspective

Summary

Regional concerns, global context: pretexts and potentialities

This book began with the challenge of relating the study of the Middle East to the broader concerns of International Relations. On the one hand, this involved deploying the categories of International Relations theory to explain the Middle East, and seeing how far this particular region can be understood in terms of the concepts of International Relations and historical sociology. The argument was made of any theory that, if it could not help to explain the Middle East, it could not fly. Hopefully enough has been said to show that this challenge can be met, at least in so far as IR has a research agenda represented in the chapters of this book, for analysing the region. At the same time, the theoretical approach suggests a historical perspective, seeing the contemporary state as a product of modern forces.

In particular, four broad claims have been made about the applicability of International Relations to this region: that the region has to be seen in terms of the pattern of its historical incorporation into the global political and economic system, ‘differential integration’, and that it is this which defines the character, and limited powers, of regional states; that the central category for understanding the international relations of the Middle East and its relations with outside powers is the institutional, rather than juridical concept, of the state, inviting, but leaving open a study of the influence on its decision-making processes and policy-making;[…]