Normative consensus and regional orders: Saudi reaction to systemic crises in the Middle East
Date
2019
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This study focuses on the systemic crises in the Middle East regional state-system. The main question I deal with is “why are there frequent systemic crises in the region?” The current Middle East regional state-system, which was established after the First World War, has gone through various political crises in the last century, such as the revolutions and uprisings caused by the Arab Nationalism in the 1950s and 60s, by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the following decade, and by the Arab Spring in 2010s. The argument I put forward is that the root causes of these crises are a) legitimacy deficit, b) lack of foreign-domestic distinction, and c) disagreement over the normative consensus in the system by the main actors in the region. While the legitimacy deficit (i.e.: lack of legitimacy of individual governments and the system in general in the eyes of peoples), and lack of foreign domestic distinction (i.e.: porous borders which quickly turns an international crisis into a domestic one, and vice versa) act as permissive causes, proposal for an alternative normative consensus (i.e: alternative sets of ground rules for the system) acts as the efficient cause. To verify if such an explanation is correct, I focus on foreign and domestic politics of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during three episodes of crises: Arab Nationalism, Iranian Revolution, and the Arab Spring. By using process tracing, I reconstruct these episodes of crises from the eyes of Saudi policy makers. I test whether their perception of crises and the precautions they took correspond to causal claims of my argument. I demonstrate that Saudi policy makers also saw the legitimacy deficit, porous borders and normative consensus proposal as the main causes of systemic crises in the Middle East; and designed precautions to curb their influence.