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The Political Economy of Economic Liberalization in Syria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

Raymond A. Hinnebusch
Raymond A. Hinnebusch
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minn. 55105, U.S.A.
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Extract

When the Arab world's authoritarian-populist/;etatist regimes first emerged, they were perceived by Marxist and modernization theorists alike as potentially forging the strong states needed by late developers to pursue national development. Three decades later, the conventional wisdom sees these states as obstacles to development and statism is in retreat. Even in Syria, where the Baʿth institutionalized statist ideology more effectively than elsewhere, economic liberalization has proved inescapable.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , August 1995 , pp. 305 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

NOTES

1 For a sophisticated version of the Marxist analysis, see Farsoun, Sami and Carroll, William, “State Capitalism and Counter-Revolution in the Middle East: A Thesis,” in Social Change in the Capitalist World Economy, ed. Kaplan, Barbara H. (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1978)Google Scholar. The rentier state is exhaustively dissected in The Rentier State, ed. Luciani, Giacomo and Bablawi, Hazem (London: Croom Helm, 1987)Google Scholar. A neopatrimonial argument is made by Leca, Jean, “Social Structure and Political Stability: Comparative Evidence from the Algerian, Syrian, and Iraqi Cases,” in Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State, ed. Dawisha, Adeed and Zartman, I. William (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 164–202Google Scholar. For an argument similar to the one in this paper that political and economic rationality have not necessarily been irreconcilable in Syria, see Heydemann, Steven, “The Political Logic of Economic Rationality: Selective Stabilization in Syria,” in The Politics of Economic Reform in the Middle East, ed. Barkey, Henri (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992), 11–39Google Scholar.

2 Hinnebusch, Raymond A., Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Baʿthist Syria: Army, Party and Peasant (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), chap. 5Google Scholar.

3 World Bank, Syrian Arab Republic Development Prospects and Policies (Washington, D.C., 1980), 4:48Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 4:54, 166; SAR, Statistical Abstract, 1989, 508Google Scholar.

5 Hinnebusch, Raymond A., Peasant and Bureaucracy in Baʿthist Syria: The Political Economy of Rural Development (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), 177Google Scholar.

6 SAR, Statistical Abstract, 1989, 77, 170–71Google Scholar.

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25 Hopfinger, Hans, “Capitalist Agrobusiness in Syria's Socialist Economy” (Paper presented to Middle East Studies Association, Austin, Tex., 1990)Google Scholar.

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28 Perthes, (1990), “Syrian Private Industrial Sectors,” 19Google Scholar; interview U. S. embassy economic section, July 1994.

29 For a political-economy analysis of Egypt similar to my assessment of Syria, see Waterbury, John, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the same story told more on the political level, see Hinnebusch, Raymond A., Egyptian Politics under Sadat: The Post-Populist Development of an Authoritarian-Populist State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.