Politics in the Middle East

Published just weeks before the author's much-noted death at the age of 66, Politics in the Middle East fell into a strange oblivion, although it is Kedourie's first full-length study on the Middle East in sixteen years and sums up his career's work. Consisting of a survey history of political institutions in five countries (Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran) during the twentieth century, it parallels and completes Democracy and Arab Political Culture (reviewed in ORBIS, Fall 1992) without duplicating that smaller study. Politics in the Middle East contains the strengths (massive knowledge, brilliant analysis, utterly original insights, total honesty) as well as the weakness (a closed mind) and the eccentricity (Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict might as well not exist) of his earlier studies.

Kedourie gives full vent in this final volume to his skepticism and pessimism about the modern experience in the Middle East. Looking over the past two hundred years, he sees societies increasingly segmented, frustrated by defeats and set-backs, subjected to radical ideologies, centralized, and ruled on a despot's whim. He only grudgingly acknowledges Turkey's happier fate, seeing even that country as never more than a step away from disaster.

Recent decades have been kind to Kedourie; even his critics now admit that what they once saw as exciting political experiments (the Ba'th party, Egypt under Abdel Nasser, Khomeini's Islamic Republic) have turned out disastrously.

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