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The Middle Eastern Cold War: Unique Dynamics in a Questionable Regional Framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2011

Jeffrey James Byrne
Jeffrey James Byrne*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; e-mail: jeffrey.byrne@ubc.ca
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Extract

One of the more prominent themes to emerge from this roundtable is the desire to integrate the history of the modern Middle East with broader trends in international history, particularly with regard to the recent emphasis on “decentralizing” and “globalizing” the Cold War narrative. My own research interests are consistent with this approach, as one of the central concerns of my current project is to show how Algeria's revolutionary nationalists defied the regional categories imposed on them from the outside by pursuing overlapping diplomatic initiatives under the rubrics of Maghribi unity, African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism. After independence in 1962, the Algerian foreign ministry's main geographical divisions differed significantly from those used by the U.S. State Department—and most history departments’ hiring committees—by dividing the world into “the West,” “the Socialist Countries,” “the Arab World,” “Africa,” and “Latin America/Asia.” These categories were the product of both practical considerations and ideological/identity politics on the part of Algeria's new leaders, and to my mind suggest that the “Middle East” may itself be a particularly arbitrary and misleading geographical framework, even in comparison to other parts of the developing world where European imperialism exerted a heavy cartographical influence.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 43 , Special Issue 2: Relocating Arab Nationalism , May 2011 , pp. 320 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

NOTES

1 See also Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Smith, Tony, “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 24 (2000): 567–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mitchell, Timothy, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. Szanton, David L. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 Connelly, Matthew, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North–South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 739–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html (accessed 10 December 2010).

4 Connelly, Matthew, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Yaqub, Salim, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Quandt, William B., “Can We Do Business With Radical Nationalists? Algeria: Yes,” Foreign Policy 7 (1972): 108–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Boumedienne, quoted in C. L. Sulzberger, “Pragmatic Partnership,” New York Times, 26 February 1971.

6 Mortimer, Robert A., The Third World Coalition in International Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), 44–46Google Scholar.

7 Yaqub, Salim, “The Cold War and the Middle East,” in The Cold War in the Third World, ed. McMahon, Robert ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Westad, Global Cold War, chap. 8, 10, and conclusion. See also Halliday, Fred, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar.

8 Golan, Galia, Soviet Policies in the Middle East: From World War II to Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Primakov, Yevgeny, Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

9 Khalidi, Rashid, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon, 2004)Google Scholar; Khalidi, Rashid, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon, 2009)Google Scholar; Cole, Juan R. I., Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar; Salt, Jeremy, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar.