Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 6, December 2009–January 2010, pp. 105–122
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Of all the world’s regions, only the Middle East lacks an inclusive mechanism for the promotion of regional cooperation and security. Europe has the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); Asia the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the Western Hemisphere the Organisation of American States (OAS); Africa the African Union; and so on. Not all of these regional systems are equally effective, of course. But the lack of any such system in the Middle East is striking. Why does the Middle East stand outside this worldwide trend? Is it in the region’s interest to try to develop such a system? How could the first steps be taken towards such a goal, given the Middle East’s many rivalries and conflicts?
The Middle East is characterised by multiple, sometimes overlapping conflicts, both between and within states. While some of this is due to the Arab–Israeli dispute, many regional security issues are only peripherally related to that problem, if at all. More people have died in the region’s other conflicts than in the Arab–Israeli dispute. Moreover, the development, or attempted development, of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in the region has had as much to do with other regional disputes or imperatives as it has had to do with the Arab–Israeli dispute. Certainly, the only instances of the use of such weapons in the region – Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and its own population, and Egypt’s use of chemical weapons in Yemen – have had nothing to do with Israel.
This is not to deny the importance of the Arab–Israeli conflict, particularly in its radicalising effects throughout the region. But any truly regional approach to security and cooperation will have to accept as a starting point that a broader approach will be required. Focusing purely on the Arab–Israeli dispute as the sole security problem of the region does not reflect the Middle East’s complex and multidimensional security environment.
The idea of adopting a regional approach to enhanced cooperation and security in the Middle East has generated considerable interest over the years. One of the first regional leaders to take up the idea was President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who raised the possibility in April 1990 in the context of a broader disarmament plan for the Middle East. Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan referred several times in the 1990s to the idea of a ‘Middle East OSCE’. In 2002, then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia alluded to the need for some sort of Middle East system in the context of his Peace Initiative to the Arab League Summit in Beirut. Most recently, at the IISS Manama Dialogue convened to address these kinds of issues in a major track-two setting, the foreign minister of Bahrain made public statements in favour of...
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Peter Jones is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
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