The Middle East at the Crossroads: Regional Forces & External Powers

M.W. Conley was Associate Professor of Political Science at Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

This book is the result of the annual conference of the Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, held in 1982. As Janice Gross Stein says in her introduction, the book addresses the interplay of regional forces and outside interests which shape the politics of the Middle East today.

The book itself is divided into two major sections. The first section, which deals with the internal or regional forces in the Middle East, covers three chapters on OPEC, terrorism, and the political implications of fundamentalist Islam.

The larger second section, comprising more than 60 per cent of the book, examines the impact of outside forces on the management of conflict within the Middle East. There are chapters on the obvious key players, the Soviet Union and the United States. An additional chapter on alliance policy deals with Canadian, European, Japanese, and American approaches to the Arab-Israeli dispute. In this chapter Stein finds many more similarities than differences among the players in response to the policy that they developed toward the conflict. The final two essays in the volume focus on Canadian policy toward the Middle East. Perhaps the best chapter of the book, by DeWitt and Kirton, suggests that Canadian policy no longer responds to the dictates of liberal internationalism and the collective good. Rather, domestic factors have become far more important in the determination of policy and have begun to reinforce the pursuit of national interest through active bilateralism. They suggest that the active pursuit of self-interest (read economic self-interest through trade) is likely to shape policy in the 1980s.

The final chapter is an examination of the Canadian policy-making process toward the Middle East during the boycott/anti-boycott period. This chapter tends to substantiate the DeWitt and Kirton findings that there is now a new emphasis by Canadian leaders on the pursuit of self-interest, defined for the most part in economic terms.

DeWitt, in his conclusion, suggests the range of forces that link the Middle East to the wider international community. His not-very-startling conclusion, that peace rests on the capacity of the parties in direct confrontation, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to recognise each other’s national existence, does not leave the reader with any confidence that there will be peace in the Middle East in the near future.

The benefit of this book is that it informs the reader on a variety of the issues and forces that work in the Middle East. The disappointment is that, two years after this conference took place, there is still much conflict, little understanding, and few prospects for peace.