Introduction to The Middle East and the Cold War: Between Security and Development

The Cold War was a multidimensional conflict whose main area of contention was post-WWII Europe but whose goals and scope reached far beyond the so-called “old continent”. It would be absurd and historically false to determine the political history of the post-WWII Middle East only along the dynamics and time- frame of the Cold War: the Arab-Israeli conflict outlived the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “socialist” republics of Syria and Iraq, for example, survived their major allies of the Eastern bloc, and the Islamic Republic of Iran also shuffled all cards of Cold War alignments and theories. However, evidence from fresh research and recent historiography has shown how the Cold War conditioned the conflicts and dynamics of the Middle East, whose origins were not of its making but whose outcomes were able to affect the strategic balance of power between the two camps, and thus legitimated their interventions. This volume gathers the contributions of young scholars involved with the international history of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. Building on the literature concerning strategic issues, this volume focuses on the linkages between security and development: more precisely, between Cold War interventions and the political and economic dynamics of the postcolonial Middle East.