ABSTRACT
A Changing International Order? This book has focused on interactions between US soft power discourses and policies toward the AME’s publics. But despite continued US military, economic, political, and cultural dominance, the “US” is not simply shorthand for “the world” or “the international.” A cursory glance at the cartography of international involvement in the AME today confirms this. Russian airstrikes on Syria raise international stakes and deepen popular suffering-and perhaps resolve against internal “occupation” buttressed by what many consider external invasion. The point here is to draw attention to additional theoretical puzzles made urgent by empirical developments. Who uses soft and hard power, how, where, and in what combination? In a struggle as internationalized as Syria’s, various instruments of soft and hard power must be examined across and among actors and their respective narratives. How do Syrians engage the ostensible Russian-American rivalry1 over their thawrah, for example? One theoretical question here is how the recent trend of “anti-democracy promotion” by states such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia (Whitehead 2014)—the latter two at odds in Syria-interacts with the American “democracy promotion” whose limits have been dissected here and elsewhere. Beginning to investigate these dynamics takes us to a traditional preoccupation of IR scholars: “power” and the ensuing international order. The Americanled world order appears in disorienting flux, with both US “interests” and “values” tested and imperiled in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda’s ghosts, made more and more corporeal in ISIS, magnify the sense of crisis. For scholars this becomes an obligation to rethink the cross-sections between popular mobilization and increasingly ambiguous sets of state interactions that are together undoing the Arab postcolonial order. Thus the reshuffling that appears to be occurring between “great powers” cannot be analytically divorced from the larger movements of publics themselves. In the AME, the Arab Spring has opened the floodgates of popular dignity-demanding frustration, transformed in the best case into Tunisia’s fledgling “consensus democracy,” in the worst case precipitating a breakdown of Syrian state and society. Here policy ironically appears more attuned to the “popular” than does theory. The Obama administration correctly recognizes that “power is shifting below and beyond the nation state” (National Security Strategy 2015, 4). Yet caution borne of a ceaseless quest for “order” is inescapable: “While largely positive, these trends can foster violent non-state actors or foment instability . . . or invite authoritarian backlash” by regimes seeking to “preserve the power of the state” (National Security Strategy 2015, 4). International patrons also have a stake in such power displacements, it would seem. Thus the international dimensions and implications of “people power,” explored preliminarily in this book, bear much more extensive study in contemplating the international order as such. Theorists exploring American global leadership seem to share the Obama administration’s discomfort as “order” slips away from Washington, but some noteworthy names do not thoughtfully factor
publics into their analysis or prescriptions. Henry Kissinger’s (2014) suggestion is instead to avoid publics as much as possible, for they are disrupters of the international order negotiated and jealously guarded over by diplomats and generals. In the Middle East, for him publics are particularly troublesome; even the democratic aspirations of some are coopted by inescapable visions of an unyielding, violent “Islamic order.” The Arab Spring threatens the regional stability sustained by the likes of the Assad dynasty, which deserves repeated mention for preserving its disengagement agreement with Israel since 1974, “even during the chaos of the Syrian civil war” (Kissinger 2014, 116). As publics predictably carry out prophecies of “millennial” sectarian animosities, Kissinger advises keeping both Iran and the Gulf states “close.” The resulting, inevitably messy contests may waylay the current danger, resuscitating an Israeland Western-friendly arrangement, he argues. Any soft power beyond traditional diplomatic protocols appears for Kissinger (2014) a frivolity distracting from immovable strategic interests undergirding international politics. For it is “statesmen,” not people, who make, break, and sustain the international order. Shortly before the Arab Spring’s eruption, the solution John Ikenberry (2011) proposes for sliding American prominence is greater unilateralism within the Western democratic club. Strengthening and stringently abiding by the “rules” system standing as a cornerstone of the liberal international order can help revive American legitimacy at its helm. Here is soft power among friends, so to speak, that can in future constrain the whims of the odd George W. Bush imperialist outlier through a “check on imprudent foreign policy” (Ikenberry 2011, 359). As Syria becomes the latest and most publicized episode of mass slaughter on the world stage, Ikenberry’s suggestions appear unrealistic even as a humanitarian recipe to rescue international publics. In contrast, Amitav Acharya (2014) stands out in asserting that a decline of the American (liberal international) world order may result in more equitable global power relations. He offers a part-diagnostic, mostly prescriptive metaphor of a new “multiplex order,” a cinema house where a number of great powers, old and new, direct and produce their own films that play simultaneously as audiences move and choose among theatres. But Acharya’s vision of a new world, with power and authority dispersed among empowered “regions,” does not adequately account for the multiple dimensions of interdependence among the relevant actors. His assertion that the “agency in building world order . . . lies more with the audience than its producers” (2014, 9) is significant and warrants further elaboration. But ultimately, the movie producer-audience, elite-public interactions in his alternative world order appear passive, static, and unidirectional. Acharya (2014) briefly advocates for more democratic interactions among states regions, but has little to say on patterns of popular participation and domestic power distribution. This reticence is curious for a book published in 2014. While the popular mobilization and politics of Arab publics will not alone mold or fracture international politics, the suggestion here is that “people power’s” impact in a region as geo-strategically magnetic as the AME is worthy of consideration and further study. Perennial entanglements between agency and
various modes of structure in the uprisings (Hinnebusch 2015) deserve continued scrutiny, with particular attention directed “below.” Further explorations along these lines can function as a corresponding step to explicating the domestic (comparative politics) and international (IR) overlap expounded on by Middle East scholars such as Fred Halliday (2005). Here Christine Sylvester’s entreaty to IR scholars to look for the “spring-ers” themselves in the Arab Spring (2013, 613) is apt. How, then, can the soft power exhibited in Syrian silmiyyah reinform our thinking about a global international order, the interactions between citizens and leaders, states and publics, subalterns and neo-imperialists, Arabs, Muslims, and Westerners, democratic change and authoritarian stability and the promoters, patrons, or sponsors thereof? Integrating levels of analysis can help scholars resist the temptation to regard the 2011 protests as a one-time collective manifestation of popular agency that fizzled out and died as petrodollars, foreign fighters, re-branded autocrats and de-uniformed military leaders co-opted any naïve possibility of democratic potential and elevated global standing. Thus further inspecting the ways in which the Arab harak’s (Sadiki 2016) ongoing initiatives and responses emit power (hard, soft and in-between) outward is imperative. Probing Syrian interactions with the Americans, Russians, Turks and Gulf monarchs, in dynamics informed by regional power-plays amidst plummeting oil prices and the opening of de-sanctioned Iranian markets, can enrich further inquiry.
