Abstract
‘National security’ in the Third World, which includes the Arab world in its entirety, is primarily determined by the interaction of three factors: (i) the degree of stateness possessed by a given state; (ii) the way in which the international system impinges on its security situation; and (iii) the regional environment in which the state is located — this last factor itself partially a function of the first two variables but also possessing autonomous dynamics of its own. In other words, the national security of each Third-World state has three major dimensions which need to be studied, namely, the domestic, the global and the regional. Only a comprehensive analysis of all three dimensions, with the analysis of each dimension undertaken not in isolation but informed by the existence of the other dimensions, and by the complexity of their interactions, can provide the total picture of a state’s ‘national security’ situation.
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Notes
Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962) ch. 10.
Mohammed El Sayed Said, ‘The Arab League: Between Regime Security and National Liberation’, in Mohammed Ayoob (ed.), Regional Security in the Third World (London and Boulder Col.: Croom Helm/Westview Press, 1986).
Ali Mazrui, ‘The Triple Heritage of the State in Africa’, in Ali Kazancigil (ed.), The State in Global Perspective (Aldershot: Gower, 1986) p. 107.
For a brief but useful analysis of the American origins of the national security concept, see Stephen Philip Cohen, ‘Leadership and the Management of National Security: An Overview’, in Mohammed Ayoob and Chai-Anan Samudavanija (eds), Leadership Perceptions and National Security: The Southeast Asian Experience (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989) pp. 29–30.
Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Security in the Third World: The Worm about to Turn?’, International Affairs, 60, 1 (Winter 1983–84).
Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Regional Security and the Third World’, in Ayoob (ed.), Regional Security. According to one source, ‘Among the 116 conflicts (crises, interstate military interventions, international wars) that took place in the world between 1946 and 1977, I counted no less than 72 involving only countries from the Third World, and another 27 where at least one protagonist was from the Third World, i.e., a total of 99 or 85 per cent of all international conflicts.’ Bahgat Korany, ‘Strategic Studies and the Third World: A Critical Evaluation’, International Social Science Journal 110 (1986) p. 547.
Korany’s data is drawn from Mark Zacher, International Conflicts and Collective Security (New York: Praeger, 1979).
Charles W. Anderson has defined political legitimacy as that ‘characteristic of a society which enables men to disagree vigorously over the policies that government should pursue or the personnel that should occupy the decision-making posts, yet to support common notions of the locus of decision-making authority, the techniques by which decisions are to be made, and the means by which rulers are to be empowered’. Charles W. Anderson, ‘Toward a Theory of Latin American Politics’, in Howard J. Wiarda (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Latin America, 2nd revised edn (University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) p. 310.
For a discussion of the concept of ‘stateness’, see J. P. Nettl, ‘The State as a Conceptual Variable’, World Politics, 20, 4 (July 1968) pp. 559–92.
Infrastructural power has been defined by Michael Mann as ‘the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm’. Michael Mann, ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, in John A. Hall (ed.), States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 113.
Stein Rokkan, ‘Dimensions of State-Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe’, in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) pp. 572–4.
For detailed discussions of the origins and evolution of the modern states in Europe, see Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), and Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States.
For the carving up of the Arab world by the colonial powers at the end of the First World War and its aftermath, see Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914–1956 (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963).
Zeine N. Zeine has argued persuasively that ‘If the Turkish rule lasted for four hundred years in Arab lands and if the Arabs acquiesced in that rule most of that time, it is essentially because the Turks were Muslims… The Arabs as Muslims were proud of Turkish power and prestige. The Ottoman Empire was their Empire as much as it was the Turks’… during the greatest part of Turkish rule the Arabs did not consider the Turkish rule a ‘foreign’ rule… The vast majority of the Muslim Arabs did not show any nationalist or separatist tendencies except when the Turkish leaders, themselves, after 1908, asserted their own nationalism’. Zeine N. Zeine, The Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1973) pp. 125–6 and 127.
Clifford Geertz, ‘The Integrative Revolution’, in Clifford Geertz (ed.), Old Societies and New States (New York: Free Press, 1963) p. 119.
Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament (Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 181.
For a thorough and perceptive analysis of the problem of political legitimacy in the Arab world, see Michael C. Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
For details of this argument, see Sisir Gupta, ‘Great Power Relations and the Third World’, in Carsten Holbraad (ed.), Super Powers and World Order (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1971) p. 125. The historical precedent for the present distinction between the two arenas of great power interaction — Europe and North America — where war is ruled out, and the Third World, where it is permissible, can be traced, according to Martin Wight, to the Treaty of Câteau Cambrésis (1559) between France and Spain. ‘In a verbal agreement, that formed no part of the treaty, the delegates decided on the meridian of the Azores and the Tropic of Cancer as a line, to the west and south of which acts of hostility would not violate the treaty… “No peace beyond the line” became almost the rule of international law, giving freedom to plunder, attack and settle without upsetting the peace of Europe’.
Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester University Press, 1977) pp. 124–5.
For details of the Iran-Iraq conflict, including the belligerents’ relations with the superpowers, see Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988).
Stephanie G. Neuman, ‘Arms, Aid and the Superpowers’, Foreign Affairs, 66, 5 (Summer 1988) p. 1055.
Nadav Safran, Israel: The Embattled Ally (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981) p. 332.
Sisir Gupta, Kashmir: A Study in India-Pakistan Relations (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966).
For details of the South Asian ‘security dilemma’ resulting from the lack of congruence in Indian and Pakistani perceptions of the optimal regional balance, see Mohammed Ayoob, ‘India in South Asia: The Quest for Regional Predominance’, World Policy Journal, 7, 1 (Winter 1989–90).
J.A.C. Mackie, Konfrontasi: The Indonesian-Malaysian Dispute, 1963–1966 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1974).
For details of the Indochina conflict and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, see Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War after the War (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); and
William J. Duiker, China and Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986).
For an assessment of Israeli nuclear capabilities, see Leonard S. Spector and Jacqueline R. Smith, Nuclear Ambitions: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons 1989–1990 (Boulder, Col.: Westview press, 1990) pp. 149–74.
Helena Cobban, ‘Israel’s Nuclear Game: The US Stake’, World Policy Journal, 5, 3 (Summer 1988) p. 416.
For details of Nasser’s use of Arab nationalist ideology and its results, see Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–1970, 3rd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
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© 1993 Bahgat Korany, Paul Noble and Rex Brynen
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Ayoob, M. (1993). Unravelling the Concept: ‘National Security’ in the Third World. In: Korany, B., Noble, P., Brynen, R. (eds) The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22568-2_2
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