Lineages of Revolt. Adam Hanieh
by the encompassing accumulative imperatives of a world market.”48
Internationalization takes place through a variety of means, including the establishment of joint ventures, the expansion of foreign direct investments (FDIs), the listing of companies on overseas stock markets, and the licensing of brands and agency rights. Moreover, as the geographical scale of accumulation grows, the costs of doing business rise exponentially, generating the need for global financial markets and international banking systems. The development of highly complex global production and marketing chains means dealing with potentially disastrous fluctuations in currencies, interest rates, and other variables. Thus internationalization is also linked to the increasing power of financial instruments, such as derivatives, which enable capitalists to manage the risk associated with fluctuations in value that occur across time and space—and make money by speculating on this risk.49 All these mechanisms, which increasingly set the production and realization of value at the level of the world market, necessarily signify a growing interpenetration of ownership and control of capital.
Internationalization also necessitates a rethinking of the nature of state functions within the contemporary world market. Accumulation is always territorialized—it demands “a certain ‘coherence’ and ‘materialization’ in time and space.”50 This means that internationalizing capital is faced with the challenge of generating the necessary conditions for accumulation in all spaces of the global economy. The traditional functions of the state within a given national territory—disciplining labor, protecting private property rights, ensuring adequate financial conditions, and maintaining contracts, laws, and so forth—are thus increasingly oriented toward the international scale. This does not mean that the state has lost its importance or has been superseded by the global; in fact, the internationalization of capital often means that processes of state formation are strengthened.51 The national state apparatus has become ever more important “for managing its domestic capitalist order in a way that contributes to the managing of the international capitalist order.”52 The internationalization of the state thus develops in tandem with the internationalization of capital.
These tendencies of internationalization raise significant questions around conceptualizing class and state at the national scale. The vast flows of capital and labor across borders means that processes of class and state formation striate national boundaries; for this reason, the nation-state cannot be understood as a self-contained political economy separate from the ways it intertwines with other spatial scales, namely the regional and global. Following Ollman’s notion of “internal relations,” the relationships with these other scales are not external to the social relations existing in any particular country but actually part of what constitutes them. It is thus impossible to understand processes of class formation without tracing the way these cross-scale relations develop and interpenetrate—how these relations become part of the very nature of the nation-state itself. It is necessary, in other words, to be wary of “methodological nationalism”53—a privileging of “national” social relations without acknowledging the ways these relations are actually constituted through their relationships with other spatial scales.
In his pathbreaking account of global labor history, Marcel van der Linden makes a powerful case for the importance of overcoming such methodological nationalist biases. Van der Linden notes that methodological nationalist approaches “consider the nation state as the basic, self-evident analytical unit for historical research … Cross-border or border-subverting processes are perceived as distractions from the ‘pure’ model.”54 While it is clear that “[I]n a global perspective, the existence of nation-states obviously remains an essential aspect of the world system,” Van der Linden argues that the existence of these states need “to be thoroughly historicized and relativized vis-a-vis sub-national, supra-national and trans-national aspects.”55 An important aim of this book is to highlight the saliency of this approach to the Middle East. In a region that is so integral to the way that the world system has developed, state and class formation should be reconceptualized through this multi-scalar lens.
One useful way of thinking about these notions was elaborated by the Greek theorist Nicos Poulantzas during an earlier set of debates regarding the relationship between US and European capital in 1970s Europe.56 Poulantzas argued that internationalization was leading to the growing interiorization of “foreign” capital within the domestic social formation. In other words, in contrast to positions that posited a ceaseless conflict between national and foreign capital, Poulantzas asserted that all capital—regardless of its national origin—was compelled to orient to the global scale and, simultaneously, foreign capital had become internalized as a largely indistinguishable component of the “national bourgeoisie.”57 This did not mean that nation-states had lost their significance, or that there existed a single, transnational capitalist class, but rather that capital needed to be regarded as increasingly existing beyond any locally specific identities.
These debates bear particular significance in the Middle East because, as later chapters will demonstrate, the regional political economy has come to occupy a prime position in national economies over the last two decades. This means that it is necessary to reject the Linnean style of categorization typical of comparative politics, which divides the Middle East into “authoritarian republics” and “authoritarian monarchies” and delineates the differences and similarities of neatly ordered states whose social relations are bounded by national borders and externally related to one another. Most important to this reconsideration of the regional scale is the role of capital from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—a regional integration project bringing together the six oil-producing monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. A chief premise of this book is that the internationalization of GCC capital has transformed the political economy of the region, becoming internalized in the class structure of neighboring states.
These trends carry far-reaching political connotations. Most significantly, they bring into question one of the favored concepts of much of the Arab nationalist movement (and parts of the Left)—that of the “patriotic bourgeoisie” (ra’s al-maal al-watani), which is viewed as a potential ally against foreign capital. In Egypt, for example, one of the most prominent voices of the uprising, the Nasserist leader Hamdeen Sabahi, has emphasized this notion as an important plank of his political vision. Sabahi’s Arabic-language electoral platform in the 2012 presidential elections (in which he came in third, with 20.72 percent of the vote)58 called for putting “Egypt on the road to comprehensive renaissance, moving from the ranks of the Third World to emerging economic countries, and competing with the strongest economies of the world order.”59 While Sabahi listed a long line of important social-justice goals, including rights to food, housing, health care, education, work, fair pay, comprehensive insurance, and a clean environment, his plan for achieving these goals rested upon—in addition to the state and “cooperative sector”—what he described as “private sector–led national capital.” In this electoral program, he called upon national capital to “play the primary role that is expected of it in the Renaissance project.” He promised, if elected, to support this orientation with “investment incentives . . . and laws against monopoly that would guarantee the ability of national capitalism to achieve its social duty.”60 One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate the weaknesses inherent to this type of strategy. The conjoined internationalization tendencies of state and capital—particularly as they are expressed in a region such as the Middle East—mean that notions of independent development driven by an alleged patriotic spirit of the capitalist class offer little hope of achieving genuine liberation.
Centrality of Imperialism
The concept of internationalization captures the inexorable drive of capital to scour the globe in the search for profitable markets, raw materials, and production sites, bringing ever-larger spheres of human activity into its ambit. As this process plays out, control of capital becomes held in fewer and fewer hands. There is thus a very close connection between the internationalization of capital and its concentration and centralization.61 This relentless drive toward the domination of space is a defining feature of imperialism—the division and control of the world market by a handful of rival companies backed by the largest states. The notion of imperialism captures the tendency of dominant capital to increasingly draw the world market in on itself, forcibly extracting profits from all corners of the