Politics in the Middle East

Kedourie argues that attempts to establish constitutional government in the Middle East failed while ideological politics—nationalist and fundamentalist—triumphed. In the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern leaders borrowed European weapons, military administration, and later representative government to resist European powers, but these strategies disappointed. The aftermath was military regimes and an ideological style of politics that Kedourie traces to a fundamental incompatibility between imported constitutionalism and the region's political traditions, alongside the peculiar appeal of abstract, perfectionist ideologies that promise this-worldly salvation .

Ideological politics, in Kedourie's usage, refers to a novel political idiom that allows abstract ideals of perfection to overshadow and determine political conduct, rather than relying on practical experience and compromise . He identifies millenarianism and revolutionary nationalism as the two notable Middle Eastern examples. Ideological politics triumphed, Kedourie argues, because European ideas that contested constitutionalism 'were in the end to prove much more attractive, more consonant with certain strands of the native political tradition, and thus more significant in their impact' . The result was regimes pursuing perfectionist visions rather than attending to what government of an actual society requires.

Politics in the Middle East applies the critique of nationalism developed in the 1960 book to the specific case of Middle Eastern politics. Where Nationalism traced the doctrine's philosophical origins to Kantian self-determination and its destructive consequences in general, the 1992 study examines how ideological politics—including nationalism—took root in the Middle East at the expense of constitutional government. The book culminates Kedourie's lifelong engagement with the region, drawing on his earlier work on British policy, the Ottoman legacy, and the failure of representative institutions .

Turkey occupies a distinct position in Kedourie's account. The book includes a chapter titled 'Turkey after 1919: The Failure of Constitutionalism?' with the question mark suggesting Kedourie saw Kemalist Turkey as a qualified exception to the general pattern . Unlike the Arab successor states of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey under Atatürk pursued a vigorous program of secular constitutional reform. Yet Kedourie's analysis suggests even this case was ambiguous—the question mark signals his uncertainty about whether Turkish constitutionalism genuinely succeeded or merely represented a different form of ideological politics.

Reception was sharply divided along ideological lines. A MERIP review dismissed it as 'a textbook version of Kedourie's pessimistic essentialism,' arguing that Kedourie never asks why constitutionalism also failed in non-Islamic parts of the world, and that his approach is essentialist rather than historical or contextual . The review characterised Kedourie's method as treating 'the good old Islamic essence' as inevitably determining outcomes. Conversely, admirers like Norvell Deatkine praised Kedourie's 'wit, clarity and coherence' and his 'lucid, sharp-edged writing' as 'a lost art' . The book remains a polarising statement of Kedourie's conservative critique of Middle Eastern politics.

A frequent misreading treats Kedourie as simply arguing that Middle Eastern peoples are culturally incapable of constitutional government. His position is more specific and less crude. Kedourie's target is ideological politics as such—a modern European invention that he saw as destructive wherever it took root, not only in the Middle East . He believed constitutionalism was 'ideology-free, a politics for sensible people, appropriate to what the government of an actual society requires' . His point was that ideological politics was more attractive and consonant with certain local traditions, not that constitutionalism was biologically or culturally impossible.