Neglected Aspects of the Security Dilemma

Abstract

In addition to the anarchic interstate arena, the security environment confronting virtually all contemporary Arab countries is shaped by four peculiar dynamics. First, the governing elites of most Arab countries are still attempting to construct national identities autonomous of the legacy of European imperial control; in other words, for these states, foreign policy remains intimately connected to ‘state-building’ in the sense proposed by Robert Good some twenty-five years ago. Second, the dominant coalition of social forces in each of these countries contains a number of significant intra-regime contradictions, either because it remains centred around the broad-based coalition that led the struggle for independence, or because it represents an alliance formed out of the overriding necessity of addressing a wide range of economic and social problems in short order. Third, virtually all Arab countries are what Alexander Gerschenkron would call ‘late-late industrializes’, in which the state plays a greater role in promoting or co-ordinating industrial policy than it did in earlier industrializers. And finally, these countries stand in a relatively dependent relationship to the world’s industrial economies, from whom they receive not only manufactured goods but also increasingly vital quantities of agricultural products.