State strength, permeability, and foreign policy behavior: Jordan in theoretical perspective

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Spring, 1996 by Bassel F. Salloukh

Although a crucial period in the kingdom's political history, students of Jordan have approached this era in a largely descriptive way.(4) Hussein's biographers have also romanticized this era by overemphasizing his personal qualities and prowess as salient factors enabling him to survive the myriad challenges upon his person and regime during those turbulent years.(5) However such explanations of the Hashemite regime's survival hinder attempts to demonstrate the potential contributions of Middle East comparative politics and foreign policy analysis to theory-building in similar sub-fields across other developing regions. Hence the need to revisit this definitive period of Jordan's history and subject it to a scrutiny that, simultaneously, provides a better explanation of the regime's survival and highlights its comparative theoretical implications.

A small state actor located in a permeable regional system and endeavoring to survive regional and domestic threats, Jordan lends itself to an exploration that underscores the domestic determinants of foreign policy behavior, and the relation between foreign policy behavior and regime consolidation, legitimization, and hence survival. Toward this end, this article reconstructs the Hashemite regime's multi-level, interactive survival strategy (henceforth Husseinism) during the aforementioned period and places it within the preceding theoretical framework. In part, this study attempts to complement, but move away from, the two dominant intellectual traditions in the analysis of foreign policy behavior in the Middle East: the realist and the psychological/perceptual approaches.(6) Instead of looking at states or the decision-making elite, this article looks into states, particularly at the domestic factors and political dynamics that constrain and determine foreign policy behavior, and consequently, at the instrumental use of foreign policy for purposes of regime legitimacy and consolidation.

The purpose of this article is to explain the success of Husseinism. "Success" (the dependent variable) refers to the ability of the regime to retain power and control over the political process, and to neutralize the disruptive effects of trans-national ideologies on the domestic political arena. This article contends that the survival of the Hashemite regime in power, and the decline of an active Palestinian or Arab nationalist challenge, may be explained by four explanatory variables: a successful insulatory regional policy, the historical process of state formation, the availability of economic resources under state control, and the ability of the state to use its coercive resources without hindrance. The convergence of these factors enabled the Hashemite regime to restructure state-society relations to consolidate social control, mitigate the effects of trans-national ideologies on the domestic arena, and achieve an acceptable level of national integration among the different segments of the society gaining the state allegiance from a sizable number, or from strategic sectors, of the population.

Since the study of Husseinism contributes to the theoretical debate pertaining to the strength and relative autonomy of the state, this article opens with a brief discussion of this debate. An examination of the salient domestic dilemmas in Jordan and the impact of transnational regional pressures upon the Jordanian domestic arena reveals the most prominent factors constraining and shaping the regime's domestic and external policies. This paves the way for a multi-level explication of Husseinism, followed by a detailed explanation of Husseinism's "success." The article closes by assessing the broader definitional and theoretical implications of this study to the fields of comparative politics and foreign policy analysis in the developing world.

THE STRENGTH AND RELATIVE AUTONOMY OF THE STATE

In the Weberian tradition, the classification of states into "strong" and "weak" ones depends upon their approximation to the ideal-type "centralized and fully rationalized Weberian bureaucracy, supposedly able to work its will efficiently and without effective social opposition."(7) In this case, states are powerful, autonomous organizational actors possessing the ability to restructure society and politics through interventionist policies.(8) Some scholars, such as Michael Mann, contend that states and state elites posses an "autonomous power" independent from other actors in civil society and, as Hamza Alavi opines, the state in post-colonial societies is "relatively autonomous" from other social classes.(9) Others, such as Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol contend that "states may be autonomous actors. Whether or not they are depends on conjunctures of state structure, the relations of states to societies and transnational environments, and the nature of the challenges faced by given states."(10) An influential model for examining the strength or weakness of states in the Third World is presented by Joel Migdal. Though retaining the Weberian definition of the state, Migdal depicts the state as one, among many other, social organizations locked in "an active struggle for social control of the population," in an "existing environment of conflict."(11) The state's efforts at social control through a monopoly over the stipulation of social rules governing peoples' social behavior is actively resisted by existing social organizations who control available resources and manipulate the symbols that make up peoples' "strategies of survival."(12) In this environment of conflict, the strength (or weakness) of a state hinges upon its ability to execute state-planned social change aimed at enforcing state social control. The state's capabilities include "the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways."(13) Strong states possess high capabilities to achieve these tasks, while weak states have low capabilities. As the following analysis reveals, whether or not a state in the developing world is strong or relatively autonomous hinges upon specific definitional criteria and variables. But first, what salient domestic dilemmas prevail in Jordan?