Concepto

After having examined structures and social fields, it remains that we look at the second element of this framework: History. The formation of boundaries—whether these are social fields where states develop or other forms of social boundaries—sets a historical path giving social dynamics taking place within it a distinctive form.

History matters in several ways. First by ‘historical’ we mean situating political phenomena in place and time (Pierson 2004). We do this by examining processes—“a connected stream of causes and effects”(Tilly 2006b)—which inform us on the origins of political phenomena—markets, states—and the conditions of its development (or collapse). Second, we examine (contextually) history to see how events taking place in one field influence and shape local practices in another field. Third, in historical processes path dependency (see below) occurs where events taking place at one stage shape and constrain future developments. Finally, once a process has started, it acquires a symbolic meaning making it costly to reverse (Ibid.).

History matters in other ways. Social actors hold memories of their previous struggles that shape their current strategies and political choices. I take historical memory here to mean “the collective understanding that a specific group shares about events in the past that it perceives to have shaped its current economic, social, cultural, and political status and identity” (Davis 2005, 4). In the context of this framework, historical memory can be found in the cultural structure of a society defining and distinguishing one group from the other. This element provides cultural ingredients for organised social forces (both state and state-like organisations) to politicise. Davis calls this “a politically inscribed memory”, which “becomes an important tool for political elites to enhance their legitimacy and control” (Ibid., 1-2). Memories are preserved by social actors, who after several rounds of DIRR process, learn from previous mistakes and avoid being trapped in previously experienced interactions. As an example, we can think about ideological political movements who rise in resistance to a particular regime. Think about Islamic movements. Limits on political participation in the Arab world, leads many Islamic movements to resort to violent resistance. The first encounter usually takes a bloody form. After several interactions, however, these movements change their strategies becoming less ideological, more strategic, and hence morestructured in existing contexts. This can be observed in Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon or Algeria. Memories of previous struggles challenge existing strategies and inform future ones. Islamic movements learn from both the democratic experience of the AK party in Turkey but also from Algeria’s long bloody war. These processes are interesting to observe, particularly to see how political identities and ideologies are bent to accommodate structures within a social field.

On a different level, community groups observe different collective memories of their particular histories. For example German, Italian, or French national groups in Switzerland form different political identities from their counterparts in their respective countries. On the same level, one can differentiate between Egypt’s Christian minority’s political behaviour from that of Lebanon’s Christians minority. While Egypt’s Christian’s were resisting domination and the status quo, Lebanon’s Christian until 1990 were resisting a revision of the Lebanese political system. The variance has been shaped by the social field in which they are situated and in their position in the DIRR processes. In the case of Iraq, we shall see that strategies of different communal groups in Iraq have largely been influenced by their historical experience within Iraq and the Middle East region in general.

To understand the history of a social field, we need to introduce the concepts of path-dependence and positive feedback. We speak of a ‘history’ of a social field to the extent that developments taking place within this field are different from developments taking place outside it. The emergence of a social field may be considered as a ‘critical juncture’ that sets a path, which defines future choices by individual actors within a social field. Path dependence maybe defined narrowly to mean “that what happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of a sequence of events occurring at a later point in time” (William Sewell quoted in Pierson 2000, 252). A broader definition is that “once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high…the entrenchment of certain institutional arrangements obstruct an easy reversal of the initial choice” (Margaret Levi quoted in Ibid.).

For this study, I take this broad definition of path dependence. The emergence of states in the Middle East has set a general path, as the following chapters will argue, however, it is important to note that this generality requires auxiliary explanations of subtypes—variation in trajectory of path dependence of different states. One of the arguments presented below is that state resilience in the Middle East is due to the structure of international state system, it is, as Levi’s quote above suggests, “entrenchment of certain institutional arrangements obstruct an easy reversal”. This is largely due to positive feedback that generates a path-dependence trajectory (Pierson 2004, 21).

Further, this will tell us, and this is very important to advocates of cultural determinism, that grand cultural explanations that take Islam or Arab Nationalism to

explain politics in the Middle East have very weak ground to build on. Structural constraints, imposed by states and processes within them, shape identities (and hence political choices) and defy grand cultural explanations for the Middle East. When a path is set in motion, status quo powers establish the “mechanism of reproduction which carry and oftenamplify the effects of a critical juncture through time” (Collier and Collier quoted in Ibid., 263; emphasis added).

Conclusion

This chapter aimed to examine the Historical Structuralism model suggested for this thesis. I examined the concepts of ‘structure’ and its usefulness for the study of politics and ‘social field’ including its composition and their internal dynamics. The model provides a basis for studying the interaction of different structures (cultural, material, and political) within a social field while demarcating the role of political actors in responding, activating or deactivating these structures. Further, the model suggested a generic dynamic—DIRR—that can provide a basis to examine the ontology of the political world.

This generic model will act as a framework to examine processes of state formation and collapse in the Middle East. It will set a range of theoretical expectations that will contribute first to examine the conditions of state emergence, ontology, and survival in the Middle East situating these processes in time and place in the following chapter. With the following chapter, this model will provide us with the theoretical lenses to examine the two case studies of Saudi Arabia and Iraq in chapters five and six.

Chapter Four

The Middle East State:

Ontology, Formation and Survival

crucial property of entities is their ability to originate social causation, to do social action. —Andrew Abbott, Things of Boundaries

When things happen within a sequence affectshowthey happen.

—Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons

Introduction

As the major objective of this thesis is to define the conditions of state survival in the Middle East, the following chapter, drawing on the theoretical framework examined earlier, has four aims. In tune with the need to situate the state in the Middle East in time and place, this chapter will in the first section examine the initial conditions of state formation in the region by specifying the enabling conditions for this emergence and how these would lay the basis to examine state development and survival.

To understand the peculiarity of the state in the Middle East, section two will look at European state formation and examine how this shaped state making in the Middle East. In section three, I will examine more closely the ontology of the state in the Middle East and the dilemmas this state faces. In situating this state at the crossroads of domestic-international arenas, I will provide an explanation of state weakness in the Middle East. Finally, the fourth section will define the main variables that would contribute to our understanding of state survival in the Middle East and which will facilitate the examination of the empirical cases in subsequent chapters. I start with the initial conditions of state formation

4.1. Initial Conditions of State Formation: Theory and