Post-Colonial Middle East: Challenges and State Response

Posted on Feb 3, 2025 in Business Administration and Management (BAM)

Outline

  • Introduction: The post-colonial Middle East faced many challenges politically, socially, and economically.
  • Body 1: How they dealt with these challenges politically, socially, and economically.
  • Body 2: Short-term outcomes politically, socially, and economically.
  • Body 3: Long-term outcomes politically, socially, and economically.
  • Conclusion: Unintended outcomes politically, socially, and economically.

Essay

  • Post-colonial states were considered “backward” (a condition imposed on the region by colonial powers) in three major components:
    1. An economy mired in the production of cheap agricultural commodities requiring an unskilled workforce.
    2. The perpetuation of the system of production by denying education and the acquisition of modern skills to all but a privileged few.
    3. The forcible integration of this backward agrarian economy into an international division of labor.
  • Remedying this backwardness required a supreme effort that only the state could handle.
  • Leaders of new states saw a need for intervention to avoid wasting scarce resources.
    • The comprehensive and rational planning effort anticipated would require:
      • An inventory of available resources.
      • A strategy for their development.
      • Utilization over time and in light of the profound structural changes that would take place in the economy and society as the plan unfolded.
      • The construction of the economic levers needed to implement the plan.
  • There was an assumption that the private sector could not be relied upon to understand this kind of resource mobilization and planning.
    • The least critical saw the private sector as too weak financially, too close to a commercial and trading rather than industrial past, and too concerned with short-term profit to be the agent of structural transformation.
    • More severe critics emphasized the greed and exploitativeness of the private sector, its links to interests in the metropole, and its tendency to export capital rather than reinvest profit.
    • Private sectors did not enjoy legitimacy among the population, except in Lebanon.
    • It was believed that reliance on private entrepreneurs and on the law of supply and demand to allocate scarce resources would be wasteful and would not bring the economy out of its trap.
    • Equity was also important for state leaders.

Inequalities and State Goals

  • Gross inequalities existed, with absolute poverty for large segments of the population.
    • This was associated with the colonial system of exploitation.
    • A more equitable distribution of assets within society became a universal goal throughout the area, regardless of ideology.
State-Led Development
  • Therefore, the state took upon itself the challenge of moving the economy onto an industrial footing, shifting the population to urban areas, educating and training its youth wherever they lived, raising agricultural productivity to feed the nonagricultural population, redistributing wealth, building a credible military force, and doing battle with international trade and financial regimes that held it in thrall.