Structural Impediments to Economic Globalization in the Middle East

T here has been a basic tension between the stated objectives of Middle Eastern leaders to integrate their countries into the world economy, on the one hand, and the actual, tangible levels of this integration, on the other. Consequently, the non-democratic states of the Middle East have consistently lagged behind in such globalization indices as foreign direct investment (FDI), competitiveness, market growth and integration into international markets. Broadly, there are indigenous as well as exogenous factors responsible for the limited nature of economic globalization in the Middle East. While a number of recent studies have examined the outside factors prompting international investors to be leery of these states, the internal barriers to globalization have remained largely unex-plored. 1 This article analyzes these internal impediments, arguing that the pervasive-ness of authoritarian practices and political structures in the Middle East and North Africa significantly undermines prospects for greater levels of international economic integration. These indigenous barriers to globalization , the article argues, go to the very heart of the political economy of the authoritarian holdouts in the Middle East. Most studies of globalization in the Middle East have, often accurately, linked the region's comparatively low levels of global economic integration to any combination of insufficiently developed local markets, an underdeveloped or non-existent local labor force (as in the small monarchies of the Persian Gulf), inadequate and inaccessible information technologies, and " moralizing " or other defensive reactions by local leaders to the perceived sociocultural and political threats of globalization. 2 In general terms, each of these causes can and often does indeed serve as a real impediment to higher levels of globalization in the Middle East. Nevertheless, this article introduces a slightly different conceptualization of these impediments. More specifically, the article argues that the main impediments to greater integration into the global economy on the part of non-democratic Middle Eastern states lie in three structurally related phenomena: the " ruling bargains "