Finally catching up on some of this reading!
So,
From this perspective both civil and regional interstate wars should be seen as part of the developmental process leading in the long-run to consolidation of effective political, administrative and fiscal control over larger territorial spaces. Would this have happened in the Middle East without 'Western' interventions (both military and international-legal) during the 20th C? And if so, would the region be more stable today?
I would advise caution here. This proposition, which seems to me implicit in Lustick’s paper, is strictly hypothetical, contingent upon numerous different factors, and subject to problems of etymological definition.
First, consider that the role of the powers was not only as a constraint upon warfare in the name of state building, but also as an encouragement to, and a provider of legitimacy for, inter and intra-state violence. The USSR at the very least fits this description, viz. its activities in support of various different types of Arab socialist and Arab nationalist regimes and movements, which operated under the rubric of establishing an Arab Great Power.
Next, consider that though the barriers to entry into the “Market of the Powers”, to coin a phrase, were higher than they had been previously, those barriers in any case existed before the rise of imperial Europe. Did the ill-fated union of Egypt and Syria fail because of Western intervention, or because it was simply unsustainable?
Finally, let’s imagine that the critical juncture of Middle Eastern history at the end of the World War II did produce an Arab Great Power state. What would it have looked like? It would have been an ally of the USSR. It would have been facilitated by the USSR, which would have represented a Great Power actually
reducing transaction costs for state conquest. It would have been driven by totalitarian ideologies developed in Europe. It would have been fed by oil rents and consequently without restraint. Successful, it would have acquired the same moment that all Great Powers acquired, and expanded as it could. It’s hard to imagine that the world would be more peaceful today, unless you think that we would have already had another Great Power war or conflict with the Arab nation-state.
Of course, it is possible that the world would be more peaceful today, but hard to judge how to properly cost global conflagration. I wonder, if the world was more peaceful, but we’d fought another Great Power war, would you call that a fair trade off? Is Russia better off now than before the revolution? I mean, I’m sure that it is, but was it
worth it?