tion in the economy, perhaps to have a large public sector running state-
controlled industries, as required by traditional social democratic theory, can
lead to such governments being described as essentially mercantilist by their
critics.
Middle East
The Middle East is a term of European, chiefly British, origin, with a wide and
rather inexact scope. Its maximum definition comprises the countries along
the southern and eastern coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea, from Morocco
to Turkey, plus Sudan, the countries of the Arabian peninsula, Jordan, Iraq and
Iran. The terminology itself is not universally accepted: the description ‘Near
East’ is often preferred in continental Europe and sometimes on the American
continent, while some seek to maintain a distinction between the Asian and
African components. Still others consider the term insufficiently specific, and
indeed the countries included in any of these definitions have no particular
sense of forming a geo-political unity (although all, with the exception of
Israel, Turkey and Iran, are members of the League of Arab States, and, with
the notable exception of Israel,Islamis the dominant religion throughout the
region). The terminology is driven by strategic considerations which, in the
European context, go back to the days of colonial expansion. The Middle East
was of tremendous strategic importance to Western powers even before the
development of oilfields in the 1920s and 1930s. This was primarily because it
was, particularly after the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, the route to Asia,
and because expansion through Turkey or Iran was the best hope for Russia to
achieve year-round access to the high seas. Consequently the decline of the
Ottoman Empire, which had controlled most of the southern Mediterranean
littoral, led to major intrusions of political control, mainly by Britain and
France, from the late 19th century onwards. One result of this was the creation
of a series of national states with little natural cultural homogeneity or genuine
national identity, a prime example being Iraq. After 1945 the tensions in the
area grew enormously because of three factors: the increasing dependence of
Europe on Middle Eastern oil reserves; the anti-colonial movement, combined
with periodic upsurges of pan-Arabism; and the creation of the State of Israel
from Palestinian territory (seeArab–Israeli Conflict). As these problems
interacted over the post-war years two further elements entered. Firstly, the
Israeli–Arab conflict came to be partially a surrogate theatre for Soviet–
Americancold war antagonisms, with each side rivalling each other to
develop client states. Secondly, and rather later, the rise of Islamicfunda-
mentalism, also tied to the Israel/Palestine problem, exacerbated the existing
set of tensions, but also presented both sides in the cold war with a serious
threat, either to the oil reserves, in the case of the West, or to its own territorial
Middle East