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State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity
Marc Lynch
1999
1. State Interests and Public Spheres
In July 1988, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan surrendered its claim to the West Bank after twenty-one years of intense diplomatic efforts to regain the territory it lost in war. This Jordanian reversal caught nearly everyone by surprise. For strategic as well as normative reasons, the West Bank was assumed to be an integral, fundamental, and primary component of Jordanian state interests. Because of this deeply held interest in the West Bank, Jordan’s decision was widely interpreted as a tactical gambit to be reversed at the first opportunity. Nevertheless, the severing of ties has become deeply institutionalized in Jordanian behavior and discourse. Jordan came to view political unity with the West Bank as a threat rather than an interest, and to support the creation of the Palestinian state which had long been considered its deepest fear. Jordan has undergone a fundamental transformation in a first order preference over an outcome vital to the state’s identity, security, and foreign policy behavior. Why did Jordan sever its ties with the West Bank? Why did Jordan not reassert its claim when circumstances shifted in its favor? Does the change in Jordanian behavior toward the West Bank signify a shift in positions based on changing incentives in the international arena, or does it represent a deeper change in Jordanian conceptions of identity and interests?
In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, forcing Jordan into excruciating political decisions of a rather different nature. With the exception of Kuwait and Iraq themselves, no state was more deeply affected, nor more existentially threatened, than Jordan. Despite its traditional alliance with the West, Jordan became one of the few states that refused to join the American coalition against Iraq, thereby suffering severe economic dislocation, political isolation, the threat of Israeli intervention, and the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees. International Relations theory has had little to say about this surprising and important decision. Power and threat balancing arguments do not convincingly explain why Jordan refused to join an almost certainly winning coalition led by its traditional international patron against a powerful neighbor which manifestly threatened small states. Rent seeking does not explain why Jordan turned down the huge financial incentives offered by the coalition. Suggestions that the democratization process constrained state policymakers beg more questions than they answer. Why did popular opinion matter so much in 1991 and so little in past and future foreign policy decisions? Why did Jordan identify so strongly with Iraq? In 1995 Jordan shifted alignments, abandoning Iraq in favor of Israel and the United States. How can this decision be reconciled with the theoretical and empirical conclusions drawn from the Gulf crisis? How did popular opposition affect state behavior?
In October 1994, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel. On first view, there is little puzzling in this decision. Jordan seemed to have made a rational decision based upon new international and regional power realities. Jordan and Israel were assumed to have broadly consistent strategic interests, and their long history of cooperation on functional issues and secret meetings between leaders seemed to mean that little had changed other than publicity. Did a formal peace treaty matter in any “real” way for international relations? The Jordanian regime, especially the King, demonstrated exceptional enthusiasm for the peace treaty, calling for regional transformation and a warm peace. Had Jordan been forced to sign by a preponderance of power, or had it been persuaded that the peace process best served state interests? Important currents within the Jordanian public equated the peace treaty with an identity project aimed at transforming the character of the Jordanian polity. Did the treaty represent an alignment with Israel at the expense of Jordan’s Arab identity? As regime and society clashed over the definition of Jordanian interests in relation to Israel, the relationship between contested identity and contested interests became starkly apparent. Why was the treaty so unpopular? Why did the regime and most Jordanians hold such divergent conceptions of Jordan’s interests? The tension between the competing visions escalated as the peace process collapsed on the Syrian and Palestinian fronts, the Likud assumed the leadership of Israel, and the Jordanian regime became increasingly repressive. Would Jordan’s “interests” in relations with Israel survive the failure of regional transformation and the absence of domestic support?
Each of these pivotal events in recent Jordanian political history points to the importance of the public contestation of identity and interests for international behavior. Rapid change and successive foreign policy crises coincided with an unprecedented liberalization in Jordan, in which for the first time in decades an open public sphere allowed for public deliberation over foreign policy. Jordanian interests assumed to be deeply embedded and stable became the subject of explicit public debate. These struggles sometimes—but not always—produced significant change in official and/or public conceptions of state interests. In official discourse, close ties to the West Bank, long seen as a fundamental interest, came to be portrayed as a serious threat; Israel, long a threat, became a strategic ally; Iraq, long a pillar of Jordanian security, became a threat. In some cases, sharply divergent conceptions of Jordanian interests emerged, as societal forces challenged government policies and the interpretations of interests used to justify them; the public contested the redefinition of Jordan’s relationship with both Iraq and Israel. In others, public deliberation produced a new consensus around official policy; most of the public came to accept the severing of ties with the West Bank and support for a Palestinian state.
I argue that state interests should be understood in terms of the interaction between the preferences of state actors and public deliberation within multiple public spheres, which do not necessarily correspond to state borders (Calhoun 1992, 1995; Habermas 1996; Somers 1994, 1995a, b). In so doing, I argue for placing communication at the center of International Relations theory. This does not imply slighting power or strategic interaction. Indeed, recent rationalist work on the dynamics of incomplete information games has moved rationalist theory toward a concern with proxies for communication such as signaling, cheap talk, and updating of information (Fearon 1994b, 1997). An approach based on both strategic interaction and communicative action focuses attention on dialogue, deliberation, and persuasion without slighting the centrality of power and interest in political behavior.
Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of communicative action and the public sphere provide the theoretical foundations for this project. By offering a conceptual framework for bridging strategic and communicative action, public sphere theory holds out the prospect for a productive synthesis of rationalist and constructivist arguments. The use of Habermas’s social theory in international relations has been to this point largely confined to the philosophical critique of positivism and to normative theorizing about the foundations for a cosmopolitan world order (Linklater 1990, 1998; Haacke 1996). The communicative approach to social action offers important insights for an empirically engaged constructivist theory of international politics (Reus-Smit 1997; Adler 1997). The attempt to take both strategic interaction and communicative action seriously offers one of the most promising avenues of engagement between rationalist and constructivist social theories (Bates, et al 1998). Political theorists and sociologists have applied Habermas’s ideas to a growing array of empirical and theoretical issues. In particular, the debate over “deliberative democracy” has brought together rational choice theorists and public sphere theory (Elster 1998; Bohman and Rehg 1997). These applications of Habermas can recast current debates in International Relations over the questions of communication, cultural norms, identity and preference formation.
I argue for the value of a public sphere approach through an empirical investigation of Jordanian behavior and Arab order. The case for public sphere theory rests both on a theoretical bid to integrate key constructivist and rationalist insights and on an empirical claim to best explain an important case. Rather than once again asserting that “norms matter” or that “rationalism can not account for preferences,” or refighting old battles over epistemology, I concentrate on theory building and testing. The cases I explore lie firmly within the arena of security; the hypotheses tested include Realist and non-Realist rationalist approaches, constructivist approaches, and the public sphere approach. The cases of Jordanian foreign policy studied are commonly accepted as important and controversial, and directly involve the major Realist concerns: war and peace, security and alliances. Despite the prominence of identity questions in Jordan , Jordanian behavior has been to this point primarily explained by rationalists (Brand 1992, 1994; Brynen 1991a,b; Mufti 1996; Harknett and VanDenBerg 1997). Jordanian foreign policy is a challenging case for constructivists, as the intense security dilemma that characterizes Middle Eastern politics should force states to conform to neorealist assumptions. The dominance over foreign policy by one leader, King Hussein, who has been in power for more than four decades, should produce considerable preference stability. I argue that there has been significant change in the conception of Jordanian identity and interests; that this change is the result of public sphere contestation; and that this has produced changes in Jordanian behavior which cannot be adequately explained in rationalist terms.
Contested Identity, Contested Security
From Europe to Asia, from the Democratic Peace to the war in Yugoslavia, identity has been used to explain important dimensions of state behavior (Chafetz 1998; Katzenstein 1996a; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996). Arab states have faced multiple domestic and international potential identities, embedded within an unusually strong collective sense of regional identity. Since the mobilization of local and Arab nationalism against the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism, and Zionism, political behavior has been justified in terms of conflicting claims to national identity. The tension between self-interested state behavior and norms of Arab unity has long fascinated observers of Arab politics. Analysis has alternately overstated the importance of Arab norms by asserting the uniqueness of Arab politics and understated it by focusing solely upon the manipulation of norms by Arab elites. Both extremes fail to appreciate how the articulation of identity constituted the interests for which elites struggled and how the structure of the Arabist public sphere and Arabist norms shaped strategic interaction. Arabist norms affect state behavior in ways that are theoretically consistent with the relationship between norms and interests in other parts of the world, and should be studied with the same concepts and methodologies used for other regions and issues. International Relations theory should change through engaging with this important case, rather than the Arab experience either being dismissed as unique or being forced into existing Realist theoretical models.
The tension between qawmiya (Arab nationalism) and wataniya (local nationalism) in Arab political thought and practice has structural underpinnings in the public sphere. More than most other regions, the Arab state system possessed a public sphere that transcended state borders and which often trumped domestic public spheres. Political elites debated questions of collective identity and shared interest before an Arabist audience and in pursuit of an Arabist consensus. Each Arab state was forced to justify its behavior not only before a domestic public but also before an Arabist public. The relative power of this transnational public sphere structures the strategic interaction of Arab states, leaders, and contenders for political power. Indeed, the production and manipulation of an Arab consensus was a crucial manifestation of power in the Arab order. This public sphere provides the frame of meaning and reference within which actors understand the purpose of interaction, shaping first order preferences as well as strategies. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the sincerity or principles of Arab leaders, who are famously self-interested and repressive of public discourse. Neither, however, should the pragmatic behavior and domestic repressiveness of many Arab regimes divert attention from the very real political implications of the Arab public sphere and its norms, expectations, and demand for consensus.
The case studies in this project each represent not only major international issues, but also points of fierce contention in the Jordanian polity. The relationship between the international and the domestic deliberation is a key focus of international public sphere theory. The extent to which international and domestic debate produces consensus, and whether these public spheres reinforce or oppose each other, are key variables for determining the durability of behavioral change. If deliberation changes preferences, then change will likely endure even if systemic incentives change; if not, then policy will likely shift once the systemic incentives shift. For example, the disengagement from the West Bank generated a domestic crisis, debate in an opening public sphere, and a new consensus which became institutionalized. The Jordan-Israel peace treaty, by contrast, provoked debate and an international consensus, but no domestic consensus. Each case puts the theoretical questions into sharp empirical focus. Did identity debates affect state behavior? Which debates mattered more, international or domestic? How did publicly articulated conceptions of interest relate to externally imputed, “objective” strategic interests? Did identity and interests change?
Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein (1996) propose five causal pathways for the relationship among identity, public discourse, interests, and behavior: (1) norms directly shape interests; (2) norms shape identity; (3) variations in identity affect interests; (4) configurations of identity shape international structures; (5) state policies reproduce or reconstruct norms or institutions. International public sphere theory follows several of these causal pathways. For example, state engagement in international public spheres drives states to “construct and project” identities that fit with international norms (Path 2). Jordanian struggles in the 1950s to manifest an “Arab” state identity responded to the increasing importance of the Arabist public sphere, while its efforts in the 1980s to demonstrate a “real” national identity responded to the Israeli argument that “Jordan is Palestine.” The second part of my argument follows Path 3, in which “variation in state identity can affect interests or policies of states” or “state policy may be a direct enactment or reflection of [domestic] identity politics.” In each case, political outcomes directly reflect the struggles to redefine Jordan’s identity and interests: East Bank Jordan or unitary Jordan? Arab Jordan or Peace Camp Jordan? Finally, the debate over normalization with Israel involved a struggle over the principles and institutions of international order (Path 4): Arab order or New Middle East?
A public sphere approach has not received sustained attention in the International Relations literature. Kratochwil (1989, 1994, 1995, 1996) has drawn attention to the role of public justifications in the development and efficacy of norms, situating state behavior within intersubjective structures of meaning (Hall 1999). Linklater (1990, 1996a,b, 1998) has developed Habermas’s critical theory as a philosophical alternative to existing theories of International Relations, with dialogic communities serving as the foundation for world order. Critical theorists have participated in the ongoing debate over universalism and the philosophical foundations of International Relations theory (George 1993; Hoffman 1987; Brown 1992; Haacke 1996). In a more empirical vein, several approaches have studied changes in the meaning of state sovereignty by analyzing shifts in the public justifications of intervention (Weber 1995; Biersteker and Thomson 1996; Lyons and Mastanduno 1993). An emerging “global civil society” has been a topic of significant research interest, as constructivists examine the mechanisms by which international norms are constructed and spread (Lipshutz 1992; Koslowski and Kratochwil 1994; Finnemore 1996a; Price 1998). Such attention to the institutional underpinnings of international society supports an analytical move toward the public sphere (Reus-Smit 1997). Risse-Kappen (1995, 1996, 1997) has most directly attempted to apply a communicative action framework to international relations, in his studies of the European Union, relations among democratic allies, and transnational networks. The potential existence of a global public sphere, and its implications for sovereignty, citizenship, and cultural pluralism has engaged normative and empirical theorists alike (Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1998; Bohman 1998; Habermas 1998). From a rationalist perspective, Fearon (1994a,b, 1996, 1997, 1998) has focused on the impact of communication on strategic interaction, deploying concepts such as signaling, audience costs, and commitment, which direct attention to questions of public communication. Building on these contributions, I begin to develop an international public sphere theory based on communicative action, public sphere structure, and the constitution of identity and interests through public deliberation.
While I have chosen Jordan as the case to explore the significance of international and domestic public spheres, other Arab states experience similar concerns. The debates over Jordan’s identity have parallels in virtually every other Arab state, as each state has searched for legitimacy, stability, and national identity (Hudson 1977). Lebanon, for example, has been torn since its creation between competing conceptions of Lebanon’s identity, Western or Arab (Picard 1996). Egypt has engaged in ongoing debates about the relative weight of its African, Arab, Phaoronic, Mediterranean, and Islamic identities (Jankowski and Gershoni 1997). Syria, the “beating heart of Arabism,” struggles between competing definitions of Arab identity, Greater Syria, and Syria in its present boundaries (Hinnebusch 1996; Lawson 1996). Palestinians have struggled to reconcile Arabist convictions and a territorially defined claim to national identity, and over the scope of such territorial claims (Gresh 1989, Khalidi 1996). Should “Palestine” include the East Bank or Israel inside the Green Line? Should “Jordan” include the West Bank? Should “Syria” incorporate Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine? Should “Iraq” include its nineteenth province of Kuwait? Should Arab states seek cooperation between sovereign states or should they dissolve “illegitimate” boundaries and unify? Should the allegiance of Arab states automatically go to Arab Iraq in its war with Persian Iran? Can Arab states make peace with Israel and remain “Arab”?
Internal identity debates reflect region-wide debates about the meaning and identity of the international order. The Arab identity of each state could be manifested only within a community of Arab states. The Arab order rested on shared understandings of what Reus-Smit (1997) calls the “moral purpose of the state,” by which the Arab state was seen as specifically and distinctively Arab, essentially unlike non-Arab states. While each state had individual interests and different conceptions of the collective interest, they shared a consensus on the necessity of maintaining the community itself. Interactions between Arab and non-Arab states were understood, contrary to Waltzian minimalism, as relations between like and unlike units. Identity debates cast and recast the collective purpose of Arab states; since the Gulf War and the Madrid peace process, deliberation has directly challenged the existence of this Arab community and proposed alternative regional identities (Barnett 1998; Khuli 1995; Salamah 1995). Jordan, challenged to justify its existence by Arabism and by Revisionist Zionism, its relations with Israel, and its competition with Palestinian nationalism, has been deeply engaged in public deliberation at the domestic and the international levels. Jordan’s behavior involves debates over the meaning of Arab identity, the definition of state interests, and Jordan’s place within an Arab regional order.
The Constructivist-Rationalist Debate
The origin of interests represents a crucial point of theoretical contention between rationalist and constructivist approaches (Wendt 1994; Katzenstein 1996a; Adler 1997; Checkel 1997, 1998; Clark 1998; Kimura and Welch 1998). Can identity and interests be taken as exogenous, allowing state behavior to be modeled as strategic interaction, or should identity and interests be taken as variable, contingent upon practice? Are interests systemically derived from objective security and economic concerns, or are they articulated based on identity? It seems best to not make any prior decision about such issues, but instead to formulate them as research questions. Does the contestation of state identity in public spheres, international or domestic, affect state formulations of interests? Does public sphere debate produce behavior different from what would be predicted by rationalist models?
Rationalist theories assume that actor identity can be held constant, while interests are stable and exogenous to interaction (Powell 1994; Baldwin 1993; Oye 1986). Neorealism and neoliberalism agree on the basic definition of international relations as the behavior of unitary rational states facing a security dilemma under anarchy (Powell 1994). Norms and institutions matter to the extent that they change the incentive structure of states, making certain behaviors more or less costly. An actor’s identity can be reduced to its type—a set of preferences, risk propensity and aggregation rules—without reference to culture, history, or values. Increasingly, rationalist approaches have abandoned the “state as unitary actor” assumption, attempting to establish state preferences in terms of the preferences of societal actors and the decision rules of political institutions (Milner 1997; Morrow 1997). This modeling of domestic politics offers the potential to explain changing state preferences without abandoning the rationalist assumption of stable actor preferences.
Constructivists counter that collective identity is produced through political action and through public performance, and that interests cannot be attributed without taking into account the actor’s identity. Identity involves frames of reference of meaning, constitutive of the understanding of the purpose of political activity and of the interests of the individual or the collective. The shared concern with the construction of identity and the importance of public discourse provides a hard core for a constructivist research program. Wendt has been perhaps the most influential in defining constructivism, by focusing on the mutual constitution of state actors and the international system (Wendt 1987, 1992, 1994; Katzenstein 1996a). Wendt emphasizes the intersubjective practices—norms, discourse—which give meaning to material structure. Because actors’ identities and interests are endogenous to systemic interaction, the potential for change is inherent in the process of strategic interaction.
The programmatic statement of constructivism’s approach to identity and interests is Wendt’s (1994): “what ‘we’ want depends upon who ‘we’ are.” This simple, compelling assertion profoundly challenges the rationalist assumption that the interests of actors can be derived from their structural position. If the definition of interests depends upon the articulation of a collective identity, then it is necessary to theorize and empirically study the construction of identities and the process by which these identities produce interests (Weldes 1996). The contested nature of both identity and interest is essential to constructivism. It challenges the direct inference of interests from any theoretically prioritized quality: social class, gender, ethnicity, power position. Instead, collective identity can be constructed out of any or all of these possible categories, as actors confront choices among multiple potential identities. Given the existence of multiple possible identities, constructivism asks why one identity triumphs over others, or how multiple identities coexist, and how the articulation of one identity rather than another informs the articulation of interests. Identity does not directly produce a single, coherent set of interests. On the contrary, actors who share a collective identity compete to interpret and frame the interests of the collective: while “we” are all Americans, “we” have very different conceptions of American foreign policy interests. “What ‘we’ want depends upon who ‘we’ are” represents a theoretical beginning rather than an end, a question rather than an answer. Public deliberation provides one route toward answering these political questions.
The stability of preferences is another key axis of the rationalist-constructivist debate (Elster 1998; Bohman 1996; Knight and Johnson 1994). Rationalists argue that actors change their strategies in response to changing circumstances, but not their underlying preferences over outcomes (Clark 1998; Lake and Powell forthcoming; Powell 1994). If preferences change in the course of strategic interaction, then it becomes virtually impossible to model behavior. Constructivism argues that the underlying preferences themselves can change in the process of interaction, as actors articulate and deliberate over their interests. The major claim of “deliberative democracy” theorists is that deliberation can lead actors to change their preferences, reduce (but not eliminate) the need for aggregative decisions, and thereby enhance the legitimacy of decisions (Elster 1998). By identifying the structural preconditions, the mechanisms, and the significance of change, a public sphere approach can bridge constructivist and rationalist arguments. Identifying the conditions for the initiation of communicative action should allow for the specification of the applicability of rationalist and constructivist theories. I identify three necessary conditions for the initiation of communicative action on state identity and preferences: perception of crisis, the presence of a public sphere, and a will to consensus. During periods of crisis in which a public sphere offers the potential for communicative action, change in actor identity and interests becomes possible. Once underway, a dialogue involves dynamics of persuasion and strategic framing which could result either in change or in the reinforcement of the status quo. During periods of “normal politics,” or where an effective public sphere does not exist, actor identity and interests are likely to be relatively stable, and rationalist models of strategic interaction should apply.
Public sphere theory engages with both rationalism and constructivism around the themes of identity and interests. Defined as “a contested participatory site in which actors with overlapping identities... engage in negotiations and contestations over political and social life,” the public sphere is that site of interaction in which actors routinely reach understandings about norms, identities, and interests through the public exchange of discourse (Calhoun 1993). This functional definition of the public sphere makes no assumptions about either its location (with regard to the state) or its content (with regard to rational-critical discourse). By making the public sphere a component of structure, it becomes possible to account for significant variation in the institutional and social content of political behavior (see chapter 2). The public sphere is a dimension of a social structure that has both material and normative elements, involving sites of communication and contestation that can be identified independently of outcomes (Habermas 1996; Ruggie and Kratochwil 1986).
A public sphere approach builds on a conception of action in which a public claim on identity or an argument made in the public sphere is an action. In a very real sense, in diplomacy, words are deeds: positions, resolutions, condemnations, assurances, declarations of friendship, warnings. For the rationalist, talk is only talk, sharply distinguished from action, and talk is cheap (Elster 1998; Johnson 1993, 1998). Because international politics is assumed to be asocial and competitive, an actor can never trust the sincerity of another actor, and therefore can only judge capabilities and concrete actions (Fearon 1998). While political actors often use talk to mask their real intentions or to substitute for more concrete measures, this does not diminish the extent to which words constitute the substance of international politics. Public discourse shapes the political significance of action: Do arms sales constitute an alliance or only a business transaction? Is the provision of foreign aid tied to human rights compliance? Is trade with South Africa an endorsement of Apartheid? Is the deployment of nuclear weapons in a neighboring state a threat? Is the political merger of two Arab states an annexation or a unification? Public discourse is the action by which behavior is interpreted and rendered sensible, and persuading others to accept a particular interpretive frame is an important component of strategic interaction. Consistent public interpretation of a policy can, over time, shape an actor’s own understanding of the policy and its significance, in what Elster (1997) has called “the civilizing force of hypocrisy.”
In terms of its approach to identity, public sphere theory can therefore be compatible with both rationalism and constructivism. Rather than assuming the stability of state identity and interests, a public sphere approach focuses on the construction of identity and the political struggle to define state interests (Weldes 1996; Koslowski and Kratochwil 1994; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Katzenstein 1996a). Habermas has been criticized for taking actor identities and interests as given and exogenous to the public sphere (Somers 1995; Calhoun 1992). Within public sphere theory, however, it is now widely argued that under certain conditions deliberation can produce change (Bohman 1996; Benhabib 1996). Constructivists view deliberation as constitutive, allowing actors to reconceptualize their identities and interests; rationalists view deliberation as a mechanism for coordinating preferences and reducing uncertainty (Knight and Johnson 1994; Elster 1997). Constructivists and rationalists increasingly converge on the importance of persuasion, which could be defined as bringing others to change their preferences through the force of argument.
This is not to say that interests and identity change continuously or fluidly, however. Identities and interests change primarily during moments of crisis, when they lose their “taken for granted” quality and become the subject of explicit public debate. During periods of “normal politics,” interests are likely to be relatively stable. For example, Jordan’s interest in reclaiming the West Bank drove its behavior for twenty years after the 1967 war, despite Arab and Palestinian criticism, little support on the West Bank, domestic opposition inside of Jordan, and substantial incentives to abandon its claim. It is this stability of deeply held interests that makes their change theoretically and empirically interesting and important. This approach to interests, which attempts to explain the relationship between objectively ascribed and publicly constructed interests on the one hand and the potential and direction of change of interests on the other, holds out the potential for moving beyond rationalist-constructivist opposition toward theoretically productive synthesis.
Rationalism and Identity
While I have followed Wendt in drawing the lines of debate between rationalists who do not look at questions of identity and constructivists who do, rationalists do employ an implicit theory of state identity. Realism specifies the sovereign state as the primary actor in international politics; other rationalist approaches incorporate domestic politics, economic sectors, ethnic groups, and other non-state actors. More central for rationalism is the relative stability of identity and interests, which allows the modeling of strategic behavior to proceed without the complication of changing preferences. While the unit of analysis designated as the actor varies, that designated actor can then be held constant: whatever the specified actor, its identity and its preferences remain constant, and its boundaries are not in question. Rationalism depends on the persistence of a will to independence among the units, which implies a clear conception of identity and difference (Nau 1993). With the rise of identity politics, ethnic and nationalist conflict, state breakdown, and transnational movements, rationalist International Relations theorists have increasingly recognized the need to explain these phenomena.
Rationalist theory has developed a number of arguments to explain this observable significance of identity. First, many rationalists have argued that change in identity and interests can be accounted for exogenously and then held constant for the purposes of modeling strategic behavior. For example, Ferejohn (1991) proposes using interpretive methods to determine the identity and interests of actors, before incorporating these insights into the rational actor model (Bates, et al., 1998). North (1990) suggests that institutional change follows a model of punctuated equilibrium, so that during any specific period the relevant actor identities and interests can be identified and held stable. In each case, change is sufficiently slow and uncommon that it can be effectively held out of the model. Interpretive analysis can provide important insights into the distinctive preference rankings of different actors, which can then enrich rationalist models of strategic behavior. Constructivists, in this view, provide an approach to preference formation, but do not challenge the rationalist account of behavior.
The ongoing process of interest formation challenges this division of labor between rationalist theories of behavior and interpretivist theories of preference formation. Constructivism should not be relegated to an account of preference formation outside models of strategic interaction, precisely because much political behavior involves a struggle over contested norms, identity, and interests. Identity and interests can change when they become the subject of public sphere contestation. At such moments, accepted truths become open to question, shared convictions about the role and purpose of the state become contentious, and new ideas and interpretations compete for hegemonic status. The struggle to establish new interpretive frames should become part of accounts of behavior rather than being relegated to an exogenous source of preferences. The proposed division of labor is only possible once a compelling explanation has been developed of when and how preferences become unstable.
Second, many rationalists have adopted a situational, “portfolio” model of identity, in which actors select strategically from an available menu of possible identities. For Elster’s “multiple self,” identity is a function of the situation: when in the classroom he is a teacher, when at home a father. While navigating these different situations, however, his autonomous Self remains intact, coherent, and exogenous, choosing from a menu of identities. Hardin (1995) argues that political identity is chosen strategically from a range of possible identities in order to maximize security or other goods. The outbreak of ethnic conflict, for example, might be explained by a combination of the ability of ethnic entrepreneurs to overcome collective action problems, the security dilemma faced by individuals, and a tipping effect affecting individual calculations (Lake and Rothchild 1998). Political identity represents a rational choice based on the incentive structure. Studies of political identity in the Middle East have often implicitly relied on such a model of rational choice of identity, arguing that actors chose Arab or statist identities based upon their likelihood of exercising social power within each community: Sunni Arabs in Iraq favor “Arabist” identities in order to maximize their social weight in the larger imagined political community, while Iraqi Kurds and Shi’a favor “Iraqist” identities in order to maximize their weight in the restricted state boundaries (Mufti 1996; Kienle 1995). Thus, Jordanians of Palestinian origin would be expected to favor ties to the West Bank in order to increase their overall weight inside of Jordan, while Jordanians of Transjordanian origin would be expected to favor severing ties to the West Bank in order to maximize their social power within the smaller Jordan.
Some institutionalists have developed a variation of the portfolio model, in the guise of role theory (S. Walker 1987; Barnett 1993). As with the portfolio model, actors choose from among a set of possible roles. Role theory assumes the existence of an autonomous Self making strategic decisions. While role theory allows for the possibility that the demands of a role can change an actor’s conception of identity, as the actor internalizes the role (which would make it a constructivist argument), the portfolio model generally posits an actor navigating multiple institutional roles without being affected by them. Barnett (1993, 1995) explains Arab international order in terms of the competition between the two institutions of state sovereignty and Arabism. The role conflict between these conflicting roles and expectations for Arab states generates behavioral instability. Posing the question as one of states embedded in competing institutions diverts attention away from the action by which Arabist norms are redeemed. This focus conceals the ways in which the identity of actors and the content of the norms changes in the process of contesting these norms (Barnett 1998 recognizes this). In that sense, Barnett comes closer to the rationalist conception of the multiple self than to a constructivist account of identity and interests.
Some Realists have argued that despite the constructed nature of identity and interests, the anarchical international system tends overwhelmingly to produce egoistic forms of identity and interest. Mercer (1995), for example, draws upon in-group/out-group experiments in social psychology to argue that under anarchy the constructed identity of states will tend to reproduce the self-help, relative gains profile of Realist theory. Attempting to turn constructivism against itself, he claims that “the more carefully one examines the question of state identity in anarchy, the stronger the assumption of egoism becomes.” (Mercer 1995: 230) Such findings would reduce the constructivist claim to purely theoretical interest. Mercer fails to grapple with the heart of the constructivist challenge, however. By insisting on the assumptions of anarchy and autonomous states, Mercer ignores the fundamental constructivist argument that state identity is shaped by the quality of the international society. In the presence of a strong international public sphere or institutions, states would not confront the simple anarchy of the realist model and would not necessarily produce the same patterns. Shared understandings and communicative action—rather than an artificial isolation and silence—could produce different patterns of identity formation and behavior. Reproducing neorealist assumptions about anarchy unsurprisingly reproduces neorealist conclusions.
Social psychology has provided a competing, non-rationalist approach to identity in international relations (Chafetz 1997, 1998; Herrmann 1997). For this approach, relationships between state actors are social relationships, in which the identification of other states as “friends” or “enemies” underlies all other calculations of threat and opportunity. Chafetz demonstrates widely varying levels of positive and negative identification, rather than a uniform tendency toward the assumption of self-help, zero-sum, competitive relations. Identification informs state responses to other states, so that the behavior or power of a friend seems less threatening than the identical behavior or power of an enemy. This approach provides important theoretical foundations for understanding the development of international identity. Such processes need to be grounded in public sphere structures, which shape the possibility of interaction and the articulation of shared identity and interests.
The dominant account of the role of Arabist norms in foreign policy remains Hudson’s (1977) description of the legitimation shortfalls of most Arab regimes. While not fully theorized, Hudson’s argument fits neatly into a rationalist conception of norms as a strategic resource. The reliance of each legitimacy-deficient state on Arabist norms leaves them vulnerable to the strategic manipulation of these norms by other actors (Telhami 1994). State actors, with stable identities and exogenously determined interests, draw on norms as resources in strategic interaction with other states and with their societies. The existence of multiple public spheres makes it problematic to assume that the state level is the only one of importance for legitimation, and that action in the Arab arena is primarily for domestic consumption, however. This approach assumes a body of free-standing, unchanging Arabist norms upon which state policymakers draw, and locates the tension at the international level on this shared reliance on the same “legitimation” resource. After all, everybody can’t be the greatest defender of Palestine, which is how each regime wants to be viewed by its domestic public. Lost in this static vision is a sense of how the norms are constituted by practice, interpreted by actors, and change in the process of discursive interaction. Barnett (1998) develops an intriguing argument that the competition over the symbols of unity drives the fragmentation of the Arab order; drawing on Goffmann, he emphasizes symbolic interaction and performance in inter-Arab relations. This study of dialogues and strategic framing offers a far more nuanced and dynamic conception of norms, consistent with the public sphere approach advanced here.
Domestic and International Sources of Interests
The assumption of international preference stability rests on a sharp distinction between the realms of national politics and international relations. While there might exist a national public sphere in which various sectors of society debate the public good for domestic affairs, “politics ends at the water’s edge” and the harsh exigencies of international anarchy and the security dilemma preclude public participation in the formation of international interests. Realism views civil society as primarily “a constraint on... the pursuit of interests which are defined independently of civil society input” (Cox 1981: 134). State interests are based on objective considerations of power, strategy, security and economic wealth, not on the transient passions of the citizenry (Krasner 1978). Because foreign policy is based on objective considerations of the national interest derived from international structure, it seems plausible to postulate a set of consistent preferences. These preferences would not be likely to change in the course of domestic or international political debates, precisely because of the relative autonomy of the state and the systemic derivation of the national interest (Telhami 1990).
The conception of interests developed here argues that even seemingly objective, overriding interests are constructed based on an actor’s identity, norms, and interpretation of threat and opportunity (Wendt 1994). Shared interests and conflictual interests alike are articulated in social terms. For example, a common interpretation of Jordanian foreign policy is predicated upon the assumption that Jordan’s “real” interests lie in cooperation with Israel, both over functional issue areas and in order to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state (see chapter 6). Jordan’s public assertions of support for the Palestinian cause or of Arab unity against a Zionist threat are dismissed as cheap talk, lip service to protect Jordan against Arab attacks but in no way expressive of “real” Jordanian concerns. This approach fails to appreciate the constitutive, as well as constraining, impact of Arabist norms and the Arabist public sphere. The opposite approach, that Jordanian public assertions of its interests are “real,” is equally unconvincing; the long history of contacts between the Israeli and Jordanian leaderships and the reality of cooperation demonstrate quite clearly that a pure conflict model does not suffice (Lukacs 1997; Garfinkle 1992). Shared strategic interests exist, but they could not be publicly avowed or defended, either at home or in the Arab arena. This tension sharply demonstrates the theoretical and empirical stakes in choosing between externally ascribed “interests” and those interests articulated in the public sphere. Israel remained a publicly identified “enemy” until 1994, sharply constraining cooperation and making any increase in Israeli power be interpreted as threatening, but it also provided important strategic benefits. It is a fallacy to assume that the strategic interest is “real,” and the avowed interests are therefore “false.” The approach to interests advanced here attempts to consider the interaction between private and public conceptions of interest, and thus the difference that a public sphere makes for state behavior. Actors seek to determine their interests and to frame them with public justifications which enact the identity and moral purpose of the state. Both the strategic demands of Jordan’s position and the public assertions of Arabist identity and interests matter; the question is how their coexistence affects state behavior. How do actors reconcile these competing identities and competing conceptions of interest? Which interests, under which conditions, matter for behavior?
The identities and norms that inform the articulation of state interests are both domestic and international. Public sphere theory is not necessarily a second-image theory, and should not be equated with the study of domestic public opinion. It is not only the balance of power and threat that constitute the international sources of state interest; international institutions form the social content of international structure. Arab state identity and interests are deeply shaped by the existence of an Arab order, constructed upon an Arabist public sphere, an Arab identity, and shared Arab institutions. Were a different regional identity to be constructed, this would provide a different social content to the relationships between regional states, both in their domestic identities and in their international identities.
International Sources of Interests
International Relations theories have made a determined effort to identify the international sources of state interests. This effort has been driven by the desire to avoid the Waltzian (1979) charge of reductionism, that no domestic level argument can account for variation in international outcomes. Neorealism posits that the most basic and essential state interests can be deduced from the state’s position in the international system, rather than being contingent upon variation in domestic systems or personal leaderships. Realists argue that all states, whether democratic, Communist, monarchical, or authoritarian, tend to balance and bandwagon in predictable and rational ways. States tend to respond to incentives, threats, and opportunities in consistent, rational ways regardless of their ideology or political system. While the findings of a “democratic peace” have sharply challenged this Realist consensus, the emphasis on the systemic derivation of interests remains a fundamental component of theory (Russett 1995; Elman 1998; Owen 1997).
Institutionalism also argues that actors derive identities from international structures, in this case from their embeddedness in international institutions (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Strang 1994). Variation in state behavior can be explained by the variable institutional context structuring the environment. Rather than facing threats and opportunities within anarchy, states face more or less dense institutional structures. In a dense institutional environment, such as the European Union, states face far less of a security dilemma and can therefore pursue more cooperative strategies. Their preferences are affected by the institutional environment, rather than being solely the product of domestic structures. The international institutional environment can shape the domestic institutions of states (Katzenstein 1985; Gourevitch 1986).
Wendt has proposed grounding constructivist theory, as well, in systemic interaction. Interests change or are reproduced through interaction, as states produce collective meanings and interpretations of the situation, as well as interpretations of themselves and others. By restricting theory to international interaction and excluding domestic politics, Wendt accepts Waltz’s definition of structural international theory while contesting his Realist conclusions. This attempt to produce a structural constructivism has been quite controversial. Wendt’s desire to adhere to the “state as actor” assumption cuts off attention rather arbitrarily from other, nonsystemic sources of identity and interests. Why assume that the international system is the only site of participation in which states form interests and identities?
A more compelling constructivist theory should not arbitrarily privilege the domestic or the international. Instead, it should establish relationships between the multiple arenas in which interests are constituted. Wendt’s insights into the role of interaction should be broadened to consider the different fields within which actors interact. This is a task for which Habermas’s concepts are uniquely useful, although they have not to this point been so applied (Cohen and Arato 1984). If interests can change in the process of interaction, under what conditions does domestic or international interaction most influence the articulation of interests?
The Arab system makes it unusually clear that the priority of the domestic as the site of contestation of state identity and interests cannot be taken for granted. While every Arab state had strategic interests, each remained embedded in an ongoing public deliberation over shared Arab identity and collective interests. The preference for an outcome within an Arab consensus over any outcome outside the Arab consensus, and the definition of collective identity and interests prevents state interests from being articulated purely in terms of the individual autonomous state. If identity and interests are constructed and contested, then it becomes necessary to consider where and how they are contested. Sovereignty traditionally demarcates a qualitative line between political community inside and anarchic competition outside, but the existence of international public spheres blurs these sharp lines bounding political community. Public spheres have no necessary correlation with state borders; the formation of identity and interests should similarly not be arbitrarily restricted to one level of analysis.
Domestic Sources of Interests
While much of International Relations theory privileges the international sources of interests, foreign policy research locates interest formation within domestic institutions, political competition, and norms. Theoretical and empirical studies demonstrate the causal links between public opinion, state structures, and foreign policy (Holsti 1995). State strength, the organization of interest groups, and issue area are frequently cited to account for variation in the impact of public opinion on state behavior (Risse-Kappen 1991). Political economists deductively determine state and societal preferences based on the insight that different domestic sectors have different interests in terms of state policy toward the international economy. Rationalist approaches increasingly incorporate domestic politics, defined as decision rules for the aggregation of individual preferences (Morrow 1997; Milner 1997). In one of the most far-reaching critiques, Moravcsik (1997) argues for making domestic preferences the primary building block of International Relations theory. Variation in state preference gives content to the question of cooperation and conflict under any set of structural conditions, from pure anarchy to a highly institutionalized environment. While international structure and institutions play an important role in shaping these preferences, the primary unit of analysis is the actors and their preferences, not the structural environment. Preferences, whether identified deductively or inductively, are the basic theoretical building block.
It is important to distinguish between public opinion, as conventionally employed by foreign policy analysts, and the public sphere (Habermas 1996). The public sphere involves the exchange of arguments oriented toward producing consensus, which can have a constitutive rather than only a constraining impact. Public opinion, by contrast, implies an external constraint and an objectively existing quantity, rather than the outcome of public deliberation. I am not simply arguing that state actors are more responsive to domestic public opinion than is often assumed (public opinion as constraint). Instead, I argue that the process of formulating justifications in the public sphere, and of articulating the relationship between identity and interests, establishes the meaning and range of legitimate action (public sphere as constitutive). Rather than simply being a question of the extent to which public opinion constrains state policy, the issue is the extent to which public sphere discourse constitutes the state’s articulation of interests.
The public sphere is an important institutional variable in the domestic articulation of interests. While the impact of public deliberation in framing the national interest is usually stressed more in the study of liberal democracies than in the study of Third World autocracies, the case of Jordan demonstrates that the public sphere can have significant impact even under conditions of less than full formal democracy. The ability of various sectors to articulate and express their interests depends on the existence of the institutional means for such expression. Habermas (1996) explicitly distinguishes the public sphere from the formal political decision making institutions. Public deliberation can frame issues, articulate alternatives, interpret the meaning of policy for identity. In the absence of an effective public sphere, it seems plausible to assume that the state will enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy in the definition of the national interest, subject only to the constraint imposed by the fear of “the street.” The more developed a public sphere, however, the more the state will be forced to articulate and justify its conception of the national interest against the counter-arguments of politically important forces.
There is a tendency among observers of Jordan, as with many Arab states, to reduce foreign policy to the personal preferences of King Hussein. Given his personal control over foreign policy, Hussein’s decisions seem to be largely autonomous from domestic forces. One of the major objectives of this study is to challenge this assumption, or at least to put it into context. King Hussein makes Jordanian foreign policy, to be sure, but he does so from a position deeply embedded within the Jordanian and Arab political systems. Hussein pays close attention to the domestic and Arab implications of foreign policy. Elite opinion is transmitted to the Palace both through the public sphere and through private channels; public uprisings and riots, such as those in 1989, 1996 and 1998, represent an extreme form of public expression in the face of the breakdown of other forms of communication. The liberalization in 1989, in response to popular uprisings and demands for greater political participation, opened the public sphere to deliberation over state identity and state interests. Hussein engages in a regular dialogue over Jordanian identity and interests. His ability to act against the expressed will of the Jordanian public at key points in no way implies the nonexistence or insignificance of that opinion. As the cases in this book make clear, the Palace recognizes the importance of persuasion and the instability of policies based purely on the repressive application of state power. The King decides, but Jordan deliberates.
The relationship between identity politics and the definition of interests emerges powerfully in Jordan. Any definition of Jordanian interests necessarily rests on a definition of Jordanian identity in relation to the Arab order and in relation to the Palestinian nationalism. When King Hussein asserts that the peace treaty with Israel serves Jordanian interests , many citizens of Palestinian origin respond: “the interests of which Jordanians? Are we not equally citizens?” As Ashley (1987) suggests, foreign policy involves a “boundary producing political performance.” By negotiating for narrowly defined state interests, or by abandoning its claim to the West Bank, the Jordanian government defines the identity of the Jordanian state in new ways. The proposed separation between the internal and the external defines a pressing interest of a majority of the population [Palestine] as external. The legitimacy of any such articulation of interests depends upon the outcome of the discursive struggle about the identity of the state and of the nation.
Katzenstein (1996a) argues for a constitutive relationship between domestic norms and state interests. In his study of Japan and Germany, he concludes that cultural norms embedded in domestic institutions profoundly shape international behavior. The prevailing conception of national identity constitutes how each state understands the meaning and purpose of regional and international organizations, the role the state should play in the world, and the kinds of interests worth pursuing. In Jordan, similar arguments could be made for a correlation between domestic and international norms and structures on the one hand. The most obvious example of the embedding of an international identity into domestic norms is the Hashemite commitment to Arab unity. Jordanian discourse justifies the creation of the state in terms of the Great Arab Revolt and Arab identity. While the Hashemite rulers of Jordan pursue state interests and regime interests which often sharply contrast with the Arab consensus, they not only accept but proclaim the primacy of Arab identity. This normative stance is not tactical, and is not compelled by external pressures. On the contrary, it is deeply constitutive of the sense of purpose of the state and the regime.
Another important norm that guides Jordanian state behavior in both domestic and international arenas is “dialogue” (hiwar). Jordan’s first instinct in a political crisis is always to call for hiwar in order to find collective solutions to conflicts of interests. Countless examples could be offered, since this norm permeates Jordanian political life; I offer here one example from each arena. When faced with the threat of an electoral boycott by opposition parties in 1997, the Jordanian government called for a national hiwar over the boycott; the opposition parties accepted the appeal, only dropping out and affirming the boycott after the dialogue failed to change government policy. After tensions in the Jordanian political system peaked in the summer of 1998, Hussein appointed a new Prime Minister, who immediately announced a serious and wide-ranging “hiwar” with all sectors of society, established a “hiwar committee” made up of the senior members of his cabinet, and began a regular series of “hiwar meetings” with civil society representatives. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Jordan appealed for hiwar at the Arab level in order to arrive at an Arab solution and prevent the outbreak of war. Indeed, Jordan has always been among the leading advocates of Arab summitry and has on numerous occasions accepted Arab consensus resolutions sharply contrary to its preferences. In the ongoing crisis between the United States and Iraq in the mid-1990s, Jordan called for the opening of direct American-Iraqi dialogue, despite its own conflicts with the Iraqi regime. While these Jordanian positions might be attributed to its weak position, its need for the goodwill of its neighbors, or to hypocrisy, the fundamental consistency across domestic and international behavior suggest the constitutive importance of this cultural norm. The centrality of hiwar and the search for consensus in Jordanian norms might well contribute to the applicability of the public sphere approach developed in this book.
Jordan’s Identity
While this book focuses on the period after 1988, Jordanian history offers many examples of publicly contested identity and interests. This brief review is not intended to be a comprehensive exposition of Jordanian history, but only to introduce some of the major examples of this tension and to provide context. Since its creation as Transjordan in 1922, the Hashemite state faced a particularly tortured encounter between publicly avowed identity and strategic interests. Emir (later King) Abdullah accepted the throne of the newly created entity on the expectation that this small Emirate would serve as the launching pad for the creation of a larger Arab entity. Abdullah saw his rightful sphere of power as including Syria and Palestine as well as Transjordan, and worked tirelessly to advance and pursue this claim (Nevo 1996; Wilson 1987). In pursuit of these ambitions, Abdullah contributed immensely to the articulation of Arabism in an emerging Arabist public sphere; although most Arab nationalists rejected the Hashemite claim to leadership and resisted Abdullah’s Greater Syria plans, by engaging Hashemite Arabism in debate they defined their own conceptions of Arabism (Seale 1986). Inside of Transjordan, a small nationalist movement oriented to the emerging Arabist norms coexisted uneasily with Abdullah’s Hashemite version of Arabism; while this nationalist movement did not compare in strength or influence with its Syrian and Palestinian counterparts, it did hold several National Conferences, issue declarations, and at some level constrain Abdullah’s behavior (Wilson 1987; Hattar 1986; Muhafiza 1990).
One of the most controversial dimensions of Abdullah’s conception of interests lay in his relations with the Zionist movement in Palestine (Shlaim 1987). Unlike most Arab leaders, Abdullah saw the Zionists as a potential ally and cultivated relations with representatives of the Yishuv. These relations could not be justified before the Arabist public sphere, as they offended Transjordanian nationalists as well as the wider Arab public. At the same time, they were not entirely secret; denunciations in the Palestinian or Syrian press occasionally generated political firestorms which forced Abdullah to cool his activities for short periods. The secrecy of these relations carries important implications for the development of Arabist norms and for Jordan’s place within them, since the normative stigma attached to such contacts was strengthened with each wave of denunciations. These contacts involved extensive negotiations over the partition of Palestine between Transjordan and the Zionist movement. While historical controversy continues to rage over whether these negotiations came to fruition in 1948 (Shlaim 1987; Sela 1990; Karsh 1997), the outcome of the war generally followed the contours of the Hashemite-Zionist discussions: the Arab portions of the Palestine Mandate joined with Transjordan to constitute the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The union between the Palestinians and Transjordan followed a “national conference” in Jericho; the characterization of these events as “annexation” or as “unification” is an important part of the identity framing that followed. In 1951, Abdullah was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Palestinian nationalist. After a period of turmoil, in which a regency maintained stability and deposed Abdullah’s son Talal (Satloff 1994), Abdullah’s grandson Hussein ascended the throne, where he remains to the present day.
Hussein’s ascension to the throne coincided with the transformation of the Arabist public sphere, as the rise of Gamal Abd al-Nasir (hereafter Nasser) in Egypt initiated a period of intense public contestation and demands for physical unification of Arab states. Between 1955 and 1958, Arabism threatened the survival of both the Jordanian regime and the state (Dann 1989; Shwadran 1959). Nasser’s Arabism portrayed Jordan as a particularly illegitimate division of the Arab world, a buffer state for British interests and a guarantor of Israeli security rather than an authentic Arab state. These charges often accurately reflected Jordanian strategic interests, but framed them as inherently illegitimate and forced Jordan to publicly disavow them. Invoking a norm of distinctly Arab independence, Arabists argued that Jordan as constituted did not qualify as an “Arab state.” To the extent that these arguments persuaded Jordanians, they pushed in the direction of the voluntary dissolution of the state. This denial of Jordanian identity inspired oppositional political activity which forced a steady shift in Jordanian behavior, from the dismissal of the British Commander of the Arab Legion to the refusal to join the Baghdad Pact. Egyptian broadcasting worked because of the orientation of political publics toward this Arabist public sphere, the consolidation of its norms as the only acceptable justification for political action, and the binding of political identity to this public sphere and its norms. Military power played no appreciable role in the Arabist challenge to Jordan. The public argumentation involved more than the exertion of power as constraint, however; real persuasion took place over the nature of Arab identity and interests. To a considerable extent, Hussein was persuaded of the need for Arab unity, and many of his concrete steps reflected attempts to manifest this identity without compromising the survival of the state or the regime (Hussein 1962). Only when the throne itself came into question did Hussein assert state power and end the liberal era.
Throughout the 1960s, Jordan engaged in argumentation over its Arab identity while also working control Palestinian nationalism and to keep the Israeli border quiet in order to prevent retaliatory Israeli attacks (Morris 1991; Shemesh 1996). The tension between Arab norms and these security needs kept Jordan constantly on the defensive. In 1967, Jordan entered the war with Israel and suffered a catastrophic defeat, losing the West Bank to Israeli occupation. The decision to enter the war has been interpreted variously as opportunism based on Egyptian misinformation about the course of the war; a necessary act after Israel attacked Egypt and invoked the Arab Collective Security Agreement; and the only way Hussein could prevent an uprising among his own people had he stayed out of the war (Mutawi 1987). Whatever the motivation, the outcome was devastating: military humiliation, economic destruction, the occupation of the West Bank, a second wave of refugees. Hussein along with Nasser advocated entering into peace negotiations, based on the return of occupied territory to Syria, Egypt, and Jordan in exchange for peace.
After 1967, the rise of Palestinian nationalism challenged Jordanian sovereignty, identity, and claim to the West Bank. The reconstituted PLO implicitly laid claim to representing up to two-thirds of Jordan’s population and at times vetted a claim to Jordan itself. As the fida’yin engaged Israel in guerrilla activities and captured the public banner of Arab action, they also established increasingly autonomous areas of influence on the East Bank. The Arab order attempted to mediate between the Jordanian government and the Palestine Resistance (PRM), but by 1970 Hussein could no longer tolerate the challenge to Jordanian sovereignty and in September unleashed the army. By brutally expelling the Palestinian resistance from the country, Jordan’s regime forcefully established its identity as a Jordanian, not Palestinian, state. The Arab order, forced to choose between recognition of the right of states to defend sovereignty from internal challenge and the normative value accorded to the Palestinian cause, chose the former. Their “betrayal” of the Palestinians in Black September stood as a decisive turning point in the Arabist public sphere, as Arab leaders turned to a more conservative, state-centric conception of Arabism.
Despite condemnation and sanctions, and an abortive Syrian intervention, Jordan emerged victorious from Black September. Paradoxically, however, its military victory weakened its Arabist argumentation, as the Jordanian claim to represent the Palestinian people could no longer be credited. In the struggle for Palestinian representation in the Arabist arena, Black September won Jordan the East Bank but lost it any Arabist support against the PLO for the right to rule Palestine. In 1974, the Arab summit at Rabat declared the PLO the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, rejecting the Jordanian claim, while the PLO shifted the territorial location of Palestinian national demands to the 1967 occupied territories. From 1974 to 1993, the “peace process” involved strategic interaction among Jordan, Israel, and the PLO over the dispensation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The rise during the 1980s of the Israeli claim that “Jordan is Palestine” offers an example of the relationship among security, identity, and international public sphere argumentation outside of the Arab arena. Israel’s refusal to recognize or deal with the PLO strengthened Jordan’s international position, even as the Arab affirmation of the PLO role weakened Jordanian leverage. A Revisionist trend in Israel proposed a Palestinian identity for Jordan as the best solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This argument rose from the fringe to the political mainstream in the 1980s (Tessler 1989; Lustick 1993; Shindler 1995). The primary threat to Jordan came not from Israeli military action but from the possibility that such arguments would prove convincing in the international public sphere and undercut support for Jordanian sovereignty. To the extent that Jordan was viewed as an illegitimate state by influential international publics, the idea that with a new political system it could serve as an alternative homeland for Palestinians gained plausibility. Jordan’s responses to this threat included the domestic encouragement of a “national identity” on the premise that the way to overcome this challenge to its sovereignty in the international public sphere was to more closely conform to the nation-state ideal (Layne 1993).
Research Design
While such basic questions of social theory as the relationship among identity, interests, and behavior defy easy empirical testing, Jordan offers a remarkably useful opportunity. Between 1988 and 1998 a significant change in the quantity, quality, and location of public discussion of Jordanian identity took place, as the public sphere opened and identity shifted from a near-taboo to a veritable obsession in the Jordanian public sphere. At the same time, international events forced the articulation of Jordanian interests within changing structural circumstances. I have identified four cases of major foreign policy change in which competing rationalist and constructivist explanations can be evaluated. In addition to these four cases—the disengagement with Palestine, the peace treaty with Israel, the Gulf crisis, and the 1995 turn against Iraq—subsequent challenges to each policy provide additional behavioral observations: opportunities for Jordan to reassert its claim to the West Bank; relations with Israel during the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process; American-Iraqi confrontations. In this way, I have generated a number of observations of Jordanian behavior. Obviously, Jordan alone can neither prove nor disprove the public sphere case, but it can serve as an initial empirical test and as a demonstration of the value-added of the approach.
Identity and interests are not at stake in every issue of foreign policy and international politics. In these cases, identity and interests were at stake to an exceptional degree, however. with varying outcomes in terms of change and continuity. Therefore, I have selected on the independent variable—the thematization of identity and interests—rather than on the dependent variable—change or continuity. The liberalization process beginning in 1989 created an open public sphere, dramatically changing the public sphere structure for the contestation of Jordan’s identity and interests. In earlier periods of Jordanian political history, the primary public contestation of Jordan’s identity came in the Arabist public sphere, not from the closed Jordanian public sphere. It was only the severing of ties and the opening of the public sphere that allowed the initiation of public deliberation.
Critics of constructivism often contend that its findings are restricted to countries that do not face serious security threats or are restricted to relatively unimportant issue areas (Katzenstein 1996a; Checkel 1998). While this challenge has been met with an increasing body of empirical studies, it is still often heard. This study directly confronts these criticisms. Jordan is a small state in a nasty part of the world (to borrow a journalistic cliché). The Middle East is hardly known for a dense institutional network of cooperative regimes or for democratic systems of government. Surrounded by powerful, aggressive states such as Syria, Iraq, and Israel, and intimately involved in the most destabilizing of regional issues, Jordan faces acute security concerns. As a small, threatened state, Jordan should reasonably be expected to conform to Realist precepts. Jordan’s highly centralized foreign policy process and relatively stable political system should demonstrate considerable preference stability.
Throughout this book, rather than engaging with a broadly defined, moving target of “Realism” or “rationalism,” I prefer to engage with concrete competing hypotheses derived from their assumptions, that have been used to explain Jordanian behavior. In addition to the strategic interaction approaches, which have been the primary focus of the theoretical discussion in this and the next chapter, other approaches share rationalist assumptions. While these explanations have not always been fleshed out for each case, their theoretical presumptions and application to other cases allow me to reconstruct clear competing hypotheses. While other rationalist theories obviously exist, I have chosen those which either are most applicable to the cases at hand or which enjoy widespread currency for explaining Jordanian behavior.
The first such rationalist hypothesis is threat balancing. Drawing on Walt (1987), a balance of threat perspective argues that states tend to balance against the most threatening, rather than the most powerful, state. Walt identifies a number of objective criteria by which a state would determine threat, including aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive power, and perceived aggressive intentions (Walt 1987, p. 22). While I generally critique this approach for ignoring the processes by which threat is constructed, and argue that it consistently underdetermines outcomes, it does provide clear hypotheses about Jordanian behavior.
The second rationalist hypothesis is omnibalancing, or regime-survival. The study of foreign policy in the Third World, and in the Arab Middle East in particular, has argued that leaders choose alliances based not only on external threat, but also on internal threats to their power (Korany, Brynen, and Noble 1993; Harknett and VanDenBerg 1997; David 1991; Ayoob 1991). King Hussein therefore guides Jordanian foreign policy with an eye toward maintaining his throne, rather than only being concerned with protecting Jordan from international threats. This has been among the most influential and common interpretations of Jordanian foreign policy: the severing of ties was intended to prevent the Intifada from spreading to Jordan; the Gulf war decision was made out of fear of a domestic uprising; the peace treaty gave a guarantee of the Hashemite regime.
A third rationalist hypothesis is rent-seeking, a specific hypothesis drawing on more broadly defined political economy explanations. Brand (1994) has most persuasively argued that Jordanian policy is driven not by threat or by norms, but by the need to secure sufficient external financing to maintain its neopatrimonial state. Alliances are chosen in terms of access to valued economic resources; relations with the Gulf, Iraq, or Syria provide not only military security or political power, but also economic security. Rent-seeking models become more sophisticated when the conflicting preferences of state actors and various economic sectors are taken into account. A rationalist rent-seeking model would suggest fluid changes in policy, as states shift behavior in pursuit of the highest payoffs; a constructivist variant suggests that some kinds of interaction produce networks of trade that might evolve into communities of identity and shared interest.
The empirical chapters in this book fall into two categories. The first group are those which focus on explaining a specific, discrete foreign policy decision: the severing of ties, the peace treaty with Israel, the Gulf War neutrality, and the turn against Iraq. In these chapters (3, 5, 6, and 8), I engage competing hypotheses about the decisions: first, evaluating competing rationalist explanations for the behavior; second, presenting a detailed reading of public sphere structure and processes; third, considering evidence for the thematization and potential change of identity and interests; and finally, considering subsequent behavior for evidence of change or continuity.
The second group of chapters (4, 7, and 8) examines the implications of and the public deliberation over each of these actions, to determine the extent to which a domestic, Arabist, or international consensus emerged. Here I focus on the question of changing preferences: to what extent, and how, did these critical decisions change Jordanian identity, interests, or preferences? Were these changes institutionalized? Did they become part of the identity of the state, or did they continue to be contested?
Rationalist approaches are most useful at those points in which identity and interests are not thematized, and a consensus has been embedded in institutions. At these points, actors do strategically pursue relatively fixed preferences. Such approaches are less useful at those points where identity and interests have become focal points of public debate. If state policymakers must defend, justify, and explain their positions before a public sphere, behavior will tend to closely conform to the arguments being advanced, as each side attempts to establish its frame. If the state resorts to repression in order to enforce its interpretation, then I expect tension and erratic behavior as the state struggles to establish some operating principle. If a new consensus is achieved and institutionalized, then I would expect behavior to again conform to rationalist models, but with a new set of interests and preferences.
If the consensus on identity is challenged primarily in international public spheres, I would expect very different outcomes than when the primary site of contestation is a national public sphere. International contestation is likely to produce defensive argumentation and increased domestic repression if the argumentation is viewed as hostile or threatening. If the international public sphere is viewed as a legitimate site of deliberation over collective identity and interests, then the articulation of a consensus can persuade a state of the need to change its behavior and even its preferences. In the absence of domestic deliberation, such change is likely to be temporary, however, contingent upon changes in power or discourse, since it involves only the top decisionmakers. If the domestic public sphere is a primary site of contestation, then there is the potential for—though not a certainty of—change. Where a change in policy commands a communicatively secured consensus, and becomes institutionalized in state preferences, then the identity and interests of the actor can be said to have changed.
Chapter 2 develops the concept of the public sphere for international relations theory, with particular attention to its role in Arab politics. The rest of the book then examines the four cases from the perspective of the theoretical argument. Inevitably, a book aimed at two audiences has the potential to frustrate both. International Relations specialists may wonder at the amount of discussion of domestic politics, or the attention to public discourse. Middle East or Jordan specialists may question the value of seemingly esoteric theoretical debates, and wish for more detail on Jordanian political structures and struggles. It is important, therefore, to stress what this book is not. It is not a comprehensive political history of Jordan, or an overview of the Jordanian political system. It is not a biography of King Hussein; nor is it an insider’s account of the politics of the Royal Court, nor of Jordanian diplomacy. These cases are designed to explore and to test specific questions about political behavior from within an ongoing debate in the International Relations literature. The book maintains a tight focus on these theoretical and empirical questions, perhaps to the exclusion of other, equally interesting questions. My goals are both less and more ambitious: to answer puzzling questions about Jordanian behavior, while also advancing International Relations theory.
Note on Sources
I collected information during eighteen months of fieldwork in Jordan in 1992, 1994–95, and 1997, in addition to shorter visits to Egypt, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. While I conducted a large number of interviews, the book refers to the public record wherever possible. Since my emphasis is on public deliberation and public discourse, the statements and arguments advanced in public take on great importance. I draw primarily on the Arabic press in Jordan and elsewhere, as well as on extensive interviews and observation of public and private political debate in Jordan. Since the liberalization of 1989, political discussion in Jordan has become remarkably free and open on even the most sensitive topics, which allows considerable access to Jordanian political developments. I also rely on published collections of documents, including publications of the Jordanian Ministry of Information, the Center for Arab Unity Studies, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and the Palestinian Research Center. The Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan has carried out a number of important opinion surveys, and its director, Mustafa Hamarneh, has kindly made their findings available to me. The University of Jordan maintains useful newspaper archives, and a number of Jordanian journalists and editors gave me access to their archives and to their time. I have collected close to the universe of commentary within the Jordanian press, daily and weekly, for 1988–1997. My interpretation of these sources is heavily influenced by ongoing, often informal, discussions with journalists, politicians, and other Jordanian and Palestinian actors. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.
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