¹ Author's note: I acknowledge the support of the Groupe d'étude et de recherche sur la sécurité internationale (Université de Montréal), as well as the helpful comments of Michael N. Barnett, Yagil Levy, and Charles Tilly on an earlier version of this paper.

¹ For a recent sample of this literature, one can refer to Porter, Bruce D., War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and the European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar; and Rasler, Karen A. and Thompson, William R., War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)Google Scholar.

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³ See, for instance, Ansari, Hamied, Egypt: The Stalled Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Cooper, Mark N., The Transformation of Egypt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Universit Press, 1982)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Patrick, The Revolution in Egypt's Economic System: From Private Enterprise to Socialism, 1952–1965 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 215Google Scholar; Waterbury, John, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 10, 69, 99–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸ The use of the various indicators was determined more by their availability than by a methodological or theoretical choice. In many cases—for instance, Iraq—statistics on government finances and the size of the public sector are fragmentary or simply not available.

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³⁷ Ehteshami, , After Khomeini, 96Google Scholar. In a rare assessment of taxation in Iraq during the war, analysts came to a similar conclusion: “[T]ax collection procedures have reportedly been tightened up, but at the same time many tax rates have been reduced”; Farouk-Sluglett, et al. , “Not Quite Armageddon,” 28Google Scholar.

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⁴² Following the limited war with Israel in Lebanon in 1982, Syria's military expenditure increased by 43 percent over 1982–85. After 1985, Syria had increasing difficulty in sustaining its defense effort. For example, in 1986, 48 percent of central-government expenditure was allocated to the military, but military expenditure in real terms decreased in comparison to the previous year. By 1989, although 70 percent of central-government expenditure was allocated to defense, military expenditure in real terms was 46 percent lower than in 1985; see Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (hereafter ACDA), World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (Washington, D.C.: ACDA, 1990), 83Google Scholar. On the doctrine of strategic parity, see, for instance, Khalidi, Ahmed S. and Agha, Hussein, “The Syrian Doctrine of Strategic Parity,” in The Middle East in Global Perspective, ed. Kipper, J. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 186–218Google Scholar.

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⁵⁴ Cordesman, and Wagner, , The Lessons of Modern War. Volume I, 14, 350Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Safran, Nadav, From War to War: The Arab–Israeli Confrontation, 1948–1967 (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 349Google Scholar.

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⁵⁷ Cordesman, and Wagner, , The Lessons of Modern War. Volume II, 452Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ The weak-state thesis should also be qualified when one considers the military mobilization ratio achieved by states such as Syria and Iraq in the 1980s, in spite of the alleged lack of legitimacy of their regimes and of communal or ethnic cleavages; their performance in putting men under arms is comparable to that of European states involved in total wars; see, for instance, Tilly, Charles, “War and State Power,” Middle East Report 171 (July–August 1991): 40Google Scholar.

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⁶¹ On the mobilization of men and resources in Egypt during World War I, see Richmond, J. C. B., Egypt 1798–1952: Her Advance Towards a Modern Identity (London: Methuen & Co., 1977), 173–74Google Scholar; Roubicek, Marcel, Early Modern Arab Armies (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1977), 30Google Scholar; and Vatikiotis, P. J., The History of Modern Egypt, 4th ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 254–55Google Scholar.

⁶² The following argumentation should not be construed as a monocausal explanation of the decline of statism and the rise of liberalism in the Middle East. Obviously these developments resulted from a convergence of factors, such as the crisis of rentier economies in the 1980s and the shortcomings of stateled development and import-substituting industrialization. The emphasis is laid here on the contribution of war making for two reasons. First, it is a significant result in contrast to the historical pattern found in the European past, where war making was associated with the progress of state interventionism. Second, it is to compensate for the current literature on liberalization in the Middle East, which does not sufficiently take war making into account as a contributing variable to the process of liberalization, probably because war making is not a conventional variable in theories of political economy.

⁶³ In constant 1979 dollar values, the ACDA's figures show an increase in Syrian military expenditure from $402 million in 1971 to $1,999 billion in 1980; World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1971–1980 (Washington, D.C.: ACDA, 1983), 68Google Scholar. Estimates of the cost of maintaining the Syrian contingent in Lebanon ranged from $1 million to $3 million per day.

⁶⁴ Kanovsky, , “Syria's Current Economic Problems,” 294–95Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Picard, Elizabeth, “La Syrie de 1946 à 1979,” in La Syrie d'aujourd'hui, ed. Raymond, André (Paris: CNRS/CEROAC, 1980), 182Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ See Boris, , “The Economy,” 166Google Scholar; and Ramet, Pedro, The Soviet–Syrian Relationship Since 1955: A Troubled Alliance (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 114Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 101, 141.

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⁷⁴ Barnett, , Confronting the Costs of War, 216Google Scholar; Waterbury, , The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, 69Google Scholar. In this specific case, the increase in state power was due to the circumstances of the war, the presence of assets that could be seized in retaliation for the military intervention of Britain and France in Egypt; this cause had nothing to do with the argument presented here, which concerns the impact of the need to mobilize resources for war and not the contingent outcomes of wars.

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