ABSTRACT

The hour of decision might well coincide with the next political succession in Jordan. The Jordanian monarchy has survived eight major challenges to its stability and longevity, and today it faces a ninth. The peace process, on the other hand, held out the appealing prospect of normalization with Israel, a country with which Jordan has shared a long but discreet diplomatic relationship. Israel’s Lebanon war and the extended period of regional dislocation it produced was a time full of initial danger and subsequent opportunity for Jordan; both die kingdom and its king survived without succumbing to the former or taking full advantage of the latter. Jordan’s crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s accumulated from the many regional and domestic political changes of the last thirty years, punctuated with some bad luck and an occasional, rare lapse of royal skill. Related changes in Jordan have to do with general trends toward urbanization and secularization.