ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the political process after 1945 in the three major nonArab Middle Eastern states – Israel, Iran and Turkey. The history of these countries has little in common except in the most general terms: for example, the central importance of the American alliance and American aid (except to Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution) and, in the Israeli and Turkish cases, the problems of sustaining a multi-party democracy through decades of rapid socio-economic change. Beyond this, there is little value in a search for similarities, and I will simply provide a brief account of what I take to be the salient features of each system in terms of state construction and the distribution of power in the period up to 1990. I will also place considerable emphasis on the point that, in each country, this process was a fluid one and continually contested.