Rival sovereignties: Western hegemony and normative conflict in the Middle East state-system

This study offers an explanation for the frequent disregard for sovereignty and the principle of noninterference among states in the contemporary Middle East State-System. Current scholarship on this topic has reached an impasse through its reliance upon static and unchanging notions of sovereignty and sovereign statehood. By contrast, this study demonstrates that the widespread disregard for sovereign authority among Middle Eastern states has been caused by clashing and even rival interpretations of sovereignty based on different notions of legitimate domestic, international, inter-regional, and even territorial state practices that should legitimate regional order. As a result, regional politics was often characterized by the lack of a shared norm of legitimate sovereignty that could govern interstate relations, leading to widespread violations and challenges to individual state sovereignty. The study identified four periods when regional clashes over sovereign norms have been most apparent. These include the period surrounding the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid's "pan-Islamic" diplomacy in the late 19th century; anti-colonial nationalist Arab movements in the 1930's and 40's, pan-Arab movements led by Egypt's Nasser in the 1950's and contemporary Islamist challenges to regional sovereign authority following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. The evidence presented in this study demonstrates that in all four cases diplomacy and conflict was primarily consumed with questions about when sovereignty is invested in a particular territorial authority, its leadership, and the set of practices---domestic, inter-regional and international---embraced by regional states. This study argues that rivalries over sovereign norms in the Middle East have been so overt and frequent primarily due to the high degree of Western intervention and hegemony in the region over the past two hundred years, rather than regional cultural or religious opposition to territorial sovereignty and modern states. The dialectic of Western hegemony and regional resistance have made questions about the terms of sovereignty, independence and self-determination a core regional issue during the past 200 hundred years.