Statehood in the Middle East: In Search of New Models

... path face dangerous challenges. The renewed Saudi state will have to walk a fine line between changing the terms of the social contract with a society accustomed to paternalism and the resistance of traditionalists and Islamic fundamentalists to any reforms. A new external environment is also pushing the Middle East governments towards the search for their own development paths. Ideological centers of attraction, which existed in the bipolar world, have vanished. The nations of Eastern Europe had the experience of bourgeois-democratic development and ...