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This study is a comparative analysis of the survival strategies of two regimes: Jordan's King Hussein and Lebanon's Fu'ad Shihab. It is an exploration of the domestic determinants of foreign policy behaviour, and the relation between foreign policy behaviour and regime consolidation, legitimation, and survival in small, weak state actors located in a permeable regional system. The study advances an hypothesis of four explanatory variables to explain the success and failure of Hussein and Shihab's respective strategies. Husseinism's 'success'--as opposed to Shihabism's 'failure'--may be explained by a successful insulatory regional policy, the historical process of state formation, the availability of economic resources under state control, and the ability of the state to use its coercive resources without hindrance. This enabled the Hashemite regime to restructure state-society relations to consolidate social control, mitigate the effects of trans-national ideologies on the domestic arena, and achieve an acceptable level of national integration among the different segments of the society gaining the state allegiance from a sizeable number, or from strategic sectors, of the population.

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Since the late 1980s an increasing amount of literature has attempted to explain liberalization and democratization, or lack thereof, in the Arab world. Theories have developed around such concepts as civil society, state formation and political culture, yet a conclusive theory that could predict the future of these two processes in the Arab world has not emerged. This thesis seeks to add to this body of work by theorizing that regime type---specifically monarchical regimes---may be a useful variable in analyzing political reform in the region and will attempt to explain how and under what conditions some countries will open their political systems. This thesis takes the view that while there has been some indication of liberalization in the Arab world there has been very little evidence of democratization. Evidence of liberalization in Arab monarchies will be shown in case studies of Kuwait and Jordan.

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Why do some regimes enjoy more autonomy than others when taking foreign policy and alignment choices? How does the organization of state-society relations constrain or enable a regime's freedom to take foreign policy and alignment choices? What explains the overlap between the domestic and external security spheres of some states, but not others? Finally, how do the foreign policy and alignment choices of some regimes have domestic political origins, uses, and implications? / This study explores these theoretical questions through a comparative examination of the impact of the organization of state-society relations (the independent variable) on regime autonomy in taking foreign policy and alignment choices (the dependent variable) in King Hussein's Jordan and Hafiz al-Asad's Syria. In contrast to Jordan's overlapping security terrains, and the domestic political origins, uses, and implications of many of the Hashemite regime's foreign policy and alignment choices, in Asad's Syria these choices are responses to shifts in the external geopolitical environment. This study offers an explanation of the discrepancy between the Syrian regime's ability to ignore domestic constraints on foreign policy and alignment choices, due to its preoccupation with external sources of threat, compared to its Jordanian counterpart's inability to do so and, consequently, its preoccupation on many occasions with strictly domestic sources of threat. / This study bridges comparative politics and international relations theorizing, inviting a methodological shift away from the hitherto dominant neorealist tendency in the latter field, which anchors foreign policy and alignment choices in primarily external considerations and objectives. Borrowing from the literature on corporatism, populism, and historical institutionalism, this study also supplies a more rigorous methodology for investigating the relationship between the domestic structures of nondemocratic states and their foreign policy and alignment choices. More than a revision of neorealist theorizing, and in contrast to idiosyncratic, domestic structure, or constructivist approaches to the study of state behavior, this study contends that a contextual and historical analysis of the organization of state-society relations explains why regime autonomy to take foreign policy and alignment choices may be constrained in some states but not in others. Furthermore, and against neorealism's insistence on the external origins of foreign policy and alignment choices, this study also argues that on many occasions these choices have domestic political origins, uses, and implications. The implications of these conclusions on the study of Arab politics, and on the quest for a first-cut theory of state behavior, are also assessed.

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