Great-power rivalry shaped the outlook of Mideast statesmen and Western specialists alike

Evidence

Generations of statesmen in Arab countries have been accustomed to a situation in which they were able—were indeed required—to perform a balancing act between rival great powers, and could sometimes turn it to advantage. In most of these countries, such conditions have prevailed since the beginning of modern independence, and no other is known. It is this relationship that has shaped the outlook of their statesmen; it has also shaped that of the specialists in the de­ veloped countries, whose professional task it is to deal with these statesmen, and who interpreted their task as doing whatever was necessary to gain and to retain their good will. Neither the statesmen of Middle Eastern countries, nor the Middle East spe­ cialists of the powers, appear to have yet grasped the change that has taken place. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1710

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core interest: Lewis explains HOW the region’s own elites and, crucially, the Western ‘specialists’ who studied them were jointly produced by Cold War geopolitics — a concrete mechanism of legibility formation feeding the Said cluster.
• QUESTION: The claim that Middle East specialists were shaped by the patronage logic of winning foreign elites’ goodwill is a strong structural claim worth corroborating against other accounts of area-studies formation.
• SEED: The thesis that the end of bipolar rivalry dissolves the very category ‘Mideast expert’ is an essay-worthy angle on how knowledge-production regimes track great-power competition.