For a long time in the Arab world, “Middle East” was a dark, dismal and damnable term. Its invention and reiteration in international forums was seen as conspiracy or academic camouflage, according to my friends and colleagues Ali Al-Din Galal and Gamil Mattar in their seminal The Arab Regional Order. The long held belief was that the Arabs had more than enough historical, geographical and cultural ties to constitute an identity of their own. Some terms for the outer parameters of this identity appeared in an early book of mine, The Arabs and the Geographically Neighbouring States, which referred to Iran, Turkey, Israel and Ethiopia. But the fact remains, the term had strategic implications for the great powers that used it during the colonialist era. From a Eurocentric perspective, the Middle East was located between the Asian Far East and the Near East on the shores of the Mediterranean.
In World War II, the term’s geo-strategic connotations changed when Britain created the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC) to promote cooperation among the countries of the region as a way to circumvent interruptions to supplies from Europe due to submarine warfare in the Mediterranean. Although Britain had encouraged the establishment of the Arab League, it was also instrumental to generating the Middle East “crisis” or “conflict” between the Arabs and Israel. This perspective shaped the geography of the region for international forums such as the UN, although that geography would subsequently extend to Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and to North Africa during multilateral peace negotiations in the 1990s. With the emergence of Islamism and its associated terrorist movements, the concept expanded further to include East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, to the world’s foreign ministries, the Middle East continued to denote the territory occupied by the members of the Arab League plus Iran, Turkey and Israel. This applies to the great powers’ military maps, albeit to a lesser degree of precision.
The addition of “New” to Middle East has occurred frequently in media and academic circles for decades, especially in the wake of major events. One of the best known instances is the title that Shimon Peres gave a book he published during the heyday of the “peace process,” which occasioned both direct bilateral negotiations between the immediate stakeholders in the Arab-Israeli conflict and multilateral negotiations. The book and the term “the New Middle East” held up European post-war integration as a model for the countries of the region to emulate. By the turn of the millennium, fundamentalist maelstroms swept the region. Then came the Arab Spring which ushered in widespread upheaval, anarchy and Civil War.
In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, Mark Lynch offers us The End of the Middle East: How an Old Map Distorts a New Reality. He argues that this region has become so involved and intertwined with other regions, from the Horn of Africa to West Africa and from Asia to the Pacific, in ways that render conventional cartography meaningless. But, just as the “new reality” is embodied in a sprawling web of inter-regional relations, so too does it reflect the conditions and interplays in this region, as shaped by the cumulative outcome of events since the beginning of the 2010s.
One aspect of this reality manifests in the profound reformist drives that various Middle Eastern nation states have pursued in response to a decade of widespread spasms of domestic strife and foreign interventions. These drives have generated new demands for regional cooperation to advance common interests, whether in gas and oil, expanding markets for trade or fighting terrorism. Secondly, the costs of regional conflict have necessitated a series of talks and negotiations to reduce tensions in the region as a whole. These have calmed the Qatari crisis, opened channels for dialogue with Iran and Turkey, paved the way for the Abraham Accords between some Arab states and Israel, and opened the doors to the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum which brought about a thaw in the decades-long cold peace between Isreal and Egypt and Jordan.
Other important meetings between key regional leaders have followed, the most important being the recent Negev Summit which resulted in six ongoing working groups. Only one of these has to do with regional security and confronting Iran. The others focus on energy, tourism, health, education and food and water security. The third and, perhaps, the most important dimension of the new reality is the US departure from the region. This has combined with the complex Chinese and Russian processes of revising the world order as it emerged after the end of the Cold War. A byproduct of these dynamics is the current war in Ukraine, the consequences of which have ricocheted into the Middle East, affecting above all the realms of food and energy.
The upshot of these multifaceted developments is the need for various forms of regional cooperation, regardless of former disputes and conflicts. It is absolutely clear that the countries of this region must rely on themselves to defend their immediate interests and work together towards this end. Their awareness of this could be seen in how closely aligned they have been in their positions towards the Ukrainian crisis. While they have condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they oppose Western sanctions against Russia and have kept their channels open with both Russia and China. Further testimony to this awareness is to be found in the ceasefires and restoration of calm in Yemen and Libya.
This trend is not new to the region. In the last half of the 1970s, President Anwar Al-Sadat ushered in a similar dynamic when he wed the reformist Open Door economic policy domestically to the “peace offensive” he launched with Israel. Despite his assassination, his foreign policy initiative has remained a part of diplomatic and political heritage premised on the need to change the political environment in order to build new relations in ways that benefit from experiences elsewhere in the world. The model, here, is not Europe but rather regions closer in spirit, such as East and Southeast Asia, where cooperation and stability were wrenched from the jaws of regional contradictions and conflicts.
“New Middle East” is emerging from the bowels of major conflicts and an extremely complex and sharply polarised international climate. It is most immediately informed by these countries’ need to place their pressing mutual interests first and to rely on fellow nations with the political will to work together through political and diplomatic processes that are still in their formative phases and feeling their way forward. Although this birth has overcome many forms and phases of resistance and negative propaganda, obstacles still lie ahead within each country. At one level it is as though, having been accustomed to the climate of conflict for so long, the region perceives efforts to dispel that climate as a form of weakness or unacceptable compromise. But there are also political forces actively hostile to the process. Foremost among them are the Islamist groups whose extremism has led them to pronounce every existing government heretic and who are forever ready to fan the flames of crises and historic complexes, such as the Palestinian cause, despite how prepared Palestinian leaders are to deal with difficult and changing situations.
In all events, it is still too early to judge the exploratory process that is still at the outset and requires the will to study and probe ways to progress to more advanced levels.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 14 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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