Egypt and Saudi Arabia This

COUNTRY STUDY -- SAUDI ARABIA AND EGYPT

This research paper describes, compares and contrasts the principal factors (indicators) which have shaped the respective political cultures, dominant political leadership patterns, institutions and policies of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They include the natural environment, geographical position, religion and economic constraints and potentials.

I. Historical Evolution of Politics and the State (pre-1950)

Throughout its 6,000 year old civilization, Egypt's politics and state structures have been strongly influenced by its climate which yielded a large thinly populated arid area and a densely populated Nile River Valley whose inhabitants have been dependent for their survival on the effects of rainfall and floods. According to Metz, Egypt's political and economic system "developed around the concept of a god incarnate [the pharaoh] who was believed through his magical powers to control the Nile flood" (Egypt 8). Rule under the pharaohs generated, especially after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in the third millennium B.C., centralized royal administrative institutions and structures. Egypt's strategic geographical position at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and its grain and other agricultural resources attracted many alien conquerors, Persians, Greeks under Alexander the Great and his Ptolemaic successors, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Tulinids, Ikhshidids, Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks and from 1517 to

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under military rule. Nasser and his colleagues expanded the role of the state in promoting social reforms (land reforms, education and welfare services) and sought to promote economic development, including infrastructure construction and industrialization, through massive state intervention in the economy along socialist lines. Metz said "Nasser destroyed the political and economic power of the old feudal landowning class" (Egypt 75). While Egypt made some social and economic progress, Egypt's devasting defeat by Israeli in the 1967 ultimately undermined Nasser's popularity; and many of his statist economic experiments failed. Egypt became heavily indebted to foreign creditors in the West and to its principal arms supplier, the Soviet bloc. By the 1970s, Egypt was no longer self-sufficient in food. Anwar Sadat (r. 1969-1981), Nasser's successor as President, sought after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to alleviate Egypt's increasingly dire economic problems by reaching the 1979 Camp David Peace Accords with Israel and launching his al-infitah economic reforms which stressed economic development through incentives to private domestic and foreign capitalists and Western foreign aid. However, Metz said that the infitah "generally had an

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