A Critical Political Economy of MENA

Introduction by Joel Beinin

Political economy addresses the mutual and historical constitution of states, markets, and classes… In this perspective, causes are simultaneously effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestation.

The historical development of social formations dominated by capital is inextricably intertwined with genocides, slavery and other forms of unfree labor, racialization, patriarchy, national oppression, and empire.

Capital accumulation by individuals, partnerships, and even contemporary corporations can occur through exploiting many different forms of labor as well as cheap nature.

The ambit of political economy also includes the legal, political, and cul- tural forms of the regulation of regimes of capital accumulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; the so- cial structure of reproduction; the construction of forms of knowledge and hegemony; technopolitics; the environment as both a resource and field of contestation; the role of war in the constitution of states and classes; and practices and cultures of domination and resistance.

Circuits of production, finance, and commodities are often imbedded in ethnic or sectarian networks and intertwined with imperial and patriarchal structures.

We understand political economy as a family of intellectual orientations and research methods and eschew ideological claims that it is “scientific” or 

“objective.”

A critique of A Political Economy of the Middle East (henceforth, PEME) by Alan Richards and John Waterbury, now in its fourth edition with the addition of Melanie Cammet and Ishac Diwan to the authorial team since the third edition, and Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East (henceforth, GPDME) by Clement M. Henry and Robert Springborg.

• All four editions of PEME acknowledge the problems of using GDP as an indicator of economic and social development… 
• They offer no critique of the concept of “average social welfare,” which has little social meaning.
• The international financial institutions (IFIs—primarily the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) that compile data rely on national statistics, which may be unreliable or even falsified.
• The poverty figures the World Bank published before 2015 were not simply worthless; they were offered as “evidence” to support economic policies that were not producing the advertised results.
• The 2003 Arab Human Development Report concluded that poverty in the Arab region is higher than usually reported in the statistics compiled by the IFIs. Neither the Human Development Index nor the Arab Human Development Report appear in the first three editions of PEME. 
• The IFI’s policy prescriptions reduced social welfare from 1990 to 2010. The Arab Human Development Reports, which develop that argument in detail, remain unmentioned.
• Uncritical reliance on the IFI’s statistical data is one expression of PEME’s friendly stance toward the policy preferences of the IFIs, despite their manifest failure in all but exceptional cases (Turkey, for a time, in our region).
• These policy preferences is more assertively indicated by the replacement of “class” with “social actors” as a category beginning with the second edition… The elimination of class in the subsequent editions reflects both a deference to the world outlook of the IFIs.
• There is no critique of the earlier editions’ failure to spotlight what Cammet and Diwan consider the causes of the uprisings [of 2010-11] (PEME 4th ed., pp. 1–6). And there is no suggestion that the uprisings are an expression of a fundamental structural crisis in the regional modes of capital accumulation and governance.
• One strength of Henry and Springborg’s GPDME is its acknowledgment of the lasting impact of colonialism on the MENA region (pp. 8–10).
• The late Nazih Ayubi, an influential theorist of the Arab state, argued that Arab states have weak extractive capacity, institutional strength, and ideological appeal… However, Ayubi’s formulation of the problem as the failure of state hegemony tends to reify the state and extract it from both its domestic social context and the global political economy.
• Nazih Ayubi’s formulation, for example, gives Insufficient attention to the historical processes through which tribal formations, ethnic groups, military officers, dependent state bourgeoisies, and national liberation.
• Ayubi’s formulation elides the transition from authoritarian populist regimes—which, even if they deployed coercion against their domestic oppositions (typically Marxists or Islamists) and therefore did not fully consolidate their hegemony, enjoyed considerable popular support and pursued developmentalist economic policies with a significant redistributionist element to more nakedly authoritarian regimes that retreated from redistributionist approaches to national economic development.
• Rentier State Theory (RST) argues that oil- or mineral-rich states are autocratic because they have no need to tax their citizens to obtain revenue. RST also reifies states and detaches them from their local, regional, and international social contexts.

By contrast, the authors of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa[CPE of MENA], are committed to understanding regional states as inextricably intertwined with local and global markets and classes. They do not suggest that states simply reflect social relations. But neither do they detach the states they examine from the local and transnational social relations that brought them into being and sustain them. The authors 

• examine how a particular repressive state apparatus, the military, becomes embedded in the local and global political economy, and in the case of Egypt, comes to be the dominant fraction of the ruling coalition.
• demonstrates how the paradigm of development promoted by the World Bank undermined the projects of state construction and national independence.
• critique how the GPDME is explicitly framed by the paradigm of “development,” which tends to assume that regions of the global South, if correct policies were adopted, could and should replicate the trajectories of the developed capitalist world. Proponents of development tend to consider it a neutral, technical process that can be successfully realized by any country, regardless of its situation in the global political economy, by applying scientif ically established methods. PEME offers mild reservations about this version of development without suggesting an alternative.
• contextualise the development paradigm in the liberal political tradition and its linear view of progress and the reform projects initiated in response to the crisis of British and French imperialism in the interwar period. The promise of development was a central ideological claim valorizing the US empire during the Cold War, as announced in the title of W. W. Rostow’s influential The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto… Since the 1980s, the meaning of development has shifted. It is now associated with the neoliberal market fundamentalism promoted by the IFIs.
• argue that despite their regional perspective, ultimately GPDME and PEME deploy a Weberian methodological nationalism that explains the behavior of states in terms of typologies particular to the region. It diverts attention from the structural relationships among control of the lion’s share of MENA crude oil production by US multinational firms until the 1970s, post– World War II US hegemony over the noncommunist world, and monarchical rule in the oil-producing states of the Gulf, first and foremost Saudi Arabia.
• point out that neither book questions the conventional wisdom regarding the origins and impact of the 1973 oil crisis. Nor do they discuss the circulation of post-1973 petro-dollars as a lubricant in the transition to the financialized global economy, which they largely accept as a given. They ignore the pioneering work of Fred Halliday and Joe Stork, which, along with more recent books by Robert Vitalis, Adam Hanieh, and Toby Jones.

Plentiful coal deposits located near cities and convenient to water transport and conquest of the Western Hemisphere—not internally generated cultural, institutional, or economic advantages—allowed England and Northwest Europe to transfer their surplus populations and secure access to sugar, timber, cotton, and tobacco that uniquely enabled them to escape the ecological cul-de-sac that previously limited all of Eurasia.

However much we seek to provincialize Europe and reject its claims to universalism, we must ultimately contend with the two institutions—the capitalist market and the nation-state—which it has largely succeeded in imposing on the rest of humanity, although certainly not in a homogenized or even functionally “successful” manner.

The regime of capital accumulation established at Bretton Woods was managed by institutions, norms, and expectations that the Regulation School of political economy terms Fordism-Keynesianism. Fordism (after Henry Ford, pioneer of the moveable assembly line) signifies domestically oriented mass production using Taylorist “scientific” management techniques and mass consumption. Keynesianism. Fordism-Keynesianism was politically secured by the New Deal and European social democracy. 

The success of Fordism-Keynesianism depended on US military power, economic supremacy, and leadership in shaping the economic and political reconstruction of Europe and Japan. 

Bretton Woods conference attendees agreed to align their foreign exchange rates on this basis, thus establishing the dollar as the international reserve currency and the United States as manager of the capitalist monetary system.

During the “golden age” of Fordism-Keynesianism, these IFIs along, with the US government, supported state-led, developmentalist economic policies in the global South: moderate land reform, import-substitution industrialization, modest protective tariffs, and a substantial safety net for urban workers and government employees.

An important element of the Marshall Plan… was shifting Europe from a coal-based to a petroleum-based energy regime. Oil as a proportion of Western European energy consumption increased from 10 percent in 1948 to 15 percent in 1951 to 32.3 percent in 1960.

During the 1970s the US government established a functional arrangement with Saudi Arabia: all oil would be priced in dollars and the United States would guarantee the security of the Saudi regime. 

The recycling of petro-dollars and the Volcker Shock of 1979–81, which ended stagflation with a crippling recession brought on by raising the federal funds rate to over 20 percent, eased the way to the gradual consolidation of a new regime of capital accumulation in the 1980s termed “Flexible Accumulation” by the Regulation School, also known as financialization, neoliberalism, or simply globalization.

In the global South, the IFIs proclaimed developmentalism a failure due to its insufficient levels of economic growth… The “third world debt crisis” of the early 1980s allowed the IMF to impose “conditionalities” on loans to countries that experienced foreign exchange shortages or large budget deficits. 

Disregard for equity provoked 146 “IMF food riots” throughout the global South from 1976 to 1992. The January 1977 Egyptian “bread intifada” was among the first.

From 1950 on, Raúl Prebisch, executive director of the UN Economic Com- mission for Latin America, challenged the orthodox development paradigm based on the empirical observation that North Atlantic–style capitalism was not developing in Latin America.

Samir Amin critiqued both dependency theory and traditional Marxism, arguing that only “delinking”—establishing a modulated relationship with the world capitalist market and local control over its terms—would allow the global South to develop.

Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Eric Davis’s Challenging Colonialism, and Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions were the first scholarly works to demonstrate that class analysis illuminated important aspects of the modern Middle East obscured by Orientalism and modernization theory.

Robert Vitalis shows that the distinction between a “national” and a “comprador” bourgeoisie is invalid.

Political economy re-emerged in the 2000s. The 2007–8 financial crash stimulated new interest in global histories of capitalism, including the emergence of a new center of capital in the Gulf Arab states.

In the MENA region, the Arab popular uprisings of 2011 spotlighted the failure of Washington Consensus policies in Egypt and Tunisia as well as Morocco, Jordan, and ultimately even Turkey—the principal sites of the attentions of the IFIs. In Syria, where there was no formal connection with the IFIs, independent adoption of their preferred policies produced similar failures.

Source: A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, Stanford University Press, California, 2021.

Highlights by me, N. M.