ABSTRACT
The nexus o f domestic and foreign politics has always been a central concern of the Montreal school o f Middle East international relations, a school o f which Paul Noble is a founding member. The need to integrate domestic politics and international relations has become recently a core concern for many students of comparative politics and international relations.1 This interest in the impact of domestic factors on foreign policy and alliance choices is predominant in studies of system-and domestic-level (or Innenpolitik) theories o f state behaviour.2 Similarly, there is a substantial literature on Middle East international relationscatalogued in the next section-that examines the origins o f foreign policy and alignment choices. Nevertheless, this latter literature has hitherto failed to address important questions in the study o f Middle East comparative and international politics. These are: why do some regimes in the Arab Middle East enjoy more independence than others when taking foreign policy and alignment choices? How does the organization o f state-society relations constrain or enable a regime’s foreign policy independence? Finally, how are the foreign policy and alignment choices of some regimes deployed for domestic political uses?
