“Through an analysis of domestic factors, elements that are often presented as separate, or timeless, features of Middle Eastern politics, be they nationalism or religious fundamentalism, may turn out to be much more closely formed and transformed by their association with the state. Just as a more flexible and specific view of history has made historical analysis more effective, a more specific view of the state may, thereby, lead to a recognition of its greater influence.”
The starting point is “the approach that is broadly derivative of historical sociology, and of the stronger insights of Marxism, and, by extension, of the international dimensions, at once of history as of contemporary politics and society, that historical sociology addresses. This perspective looks at the core components of a political and social order, the state, ideology and society, and focuses specifically on how institutions, be they of political or social/religious power, are established and maintained. It seeks to locate them within the historical and international contexts in which they originated, and in terms of a set of questions about how, at any one time, they are created and maintained. There is no space here for the ahistorical verities of realism, or the timeless invocation of ‘Islam’ or the ‘Arab mind’.
The starting point for a historical perception of the state is two central, enduring categories: modernity and force. The state as an institution of coercion, administration and extraction has existed for millennia. But the contemporary state is only in a superficial sense a continuation of these earlier institutions. Rather, in Europe and the Middle East, it is a creature of modernity, of the economic and social changes associated with the transformation of the world since around 1780 and of the new inter-state system created as part of the process. The origin of these states, and historically their primary activity, has, for all claims of religious or popular legitimacy, been violence. All states, whether endogenously generated, forged through inter-state competition, as in the case of western Europe, or created from outside, owe their origin and central reproduction to force. This is more overtly so in the Middle East, where it is not easily forgotten, but was also the case for Europe in the five centuries since 1500, some of that extreme violence being not so long ago.”
—Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations - Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 50
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