Analyzing Middle East Foreign Policies and the Relationship with Europe

by Gerd Nonneman (editor)

This south-to-north perspective, using the prism of foreign policy analysis, fills a gap in the literature on Euro-Middle Eastern relations. It also adds to the study of International Relations by throwing light on wider questions.

Genres: Politics

280 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2005

Reviews

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerd Nonneman begins his book by presenting salient features and a general framework to Middle East foreign policy process. Then, he moves to discuss each country in the middle East and its relationship with European countries and U.S. in terms of analyzing it in its 3 environments which are domestic environment, regional environment and international environment. First, Morocco and its monarchy then Egypt and how it moved from a state of conflict with European countries to a state of cooperation and favoring economic interests over political issues. Then, in the third section comes syria and how it suffered from identity crisis. Moving to its neighbor lebanon, being a penetrated state made it quite a weak state,and The Maronite strong relatios with Europe. Moving to iraq during the era of Qasim 1958, just after the July 1958 coup d etat to 1963 and the beginning of Kuwait's crisis after Iraq's claims on it and then he moved to discuss the gulf countries and its management to its oil resources ,and the procedure of Decision making moving to iran, the iranian revolution and how it has completely changed its domestic and foreign policy. Moving to Turkey and its transition from being an empire to a modern state.
As a Whole, The book is well crafted, summarized and researched. It is a must read book, you have to know Middle East counties history, to be able to expect how they act.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Analyzing Middle East Foreign Policies, editor Gerd Nonneman begins by listing several assumptions that are made when analyzing foreign policy and then outlines the framework through which the book’s contributions will explore the foreign policy decisions of various Middle East/North African countries. Arguing for a greater potential for relative autonomy than has been previously assumed, Nooneman suggests looking at each Middle Eastern nation on three levels: domestic, regional, and international. While the strictness of adherence to Nooneman’s formula varies (some divide their essays into exactly those three sections, others incorporate them more haphazardly), every contribution in this volume engages with the idea that Middle Eastern foreign policies operate on all three of these levels simultaneously (and sometimes contradictorily). As the subtitle suggests, the material contains a heavy focus on Middle Eastern foreign policy considerations with Europe, again to varying degrees.

The chapters themselves tend towards being less technical than the introduction and most, if not all, are intelligible to the non-specialist. Most focus on a specific country and the first few follow Nonneman’s formula the closest: the dimensions of Moroccan foreign policy and its uniqueness, five key factors in Egyptian-European relations, and Syria’s response to globalization. The next two chapters were the ones I found most interesting. For Lebanon the author argues that, while certainly Syria has had a large amount of influence over Leabnon’s foreign policy in recent decades (this work was published in 2005), there are key domestic concerns that would have played out similarly, if not exactly the same, had Syria been absent. The Iraqi chapter focuses on the reign of Abd al-Karim Qasim from 1963 through 1968, and how the isolating effect of his policies essentially doomed the regime. Next come the determinants of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s foreign policy, which is an interesting look at what influences an organization of states and how it is able to work effectively, followed by the effects of a theocratic regime in Iran. After looking at structural and conjectural variables in Turkey’s foreign policy, the collection examines positions on climate change in oil-producing countries and why they diverge. The final full chapter explores the interaction of material and normative factors in the Middle East while the afterword breaks Nooneman’s formula by reprinting a lecture from Oman’s Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs to Belgium’s Royal Institute for International Affairs, which touches upon many of the issues dealt with more fully in the actual chapters.

Overall, this collection is a great contribution to the field of foreign policy studies and is well-crafted and researched. It can, at times, be esoteric and difficult to understand for the non-specialist, but there is lots of nice summarizing and bullet-pointing throughout that really helps drive the main ideas home. If nothing else, I recommend reading the chapters on Lebanon and Iraq to get a unique perspective on those nations, but overall this is a fine piece of scholarly work.