Introduction

The impact of globalization on the countries of the MENA region is a subject of much debate, even more so in the aftermath of the transformational events of the last decade's early years. Transformational events have also made the region into a live laboratory of how enhanced globalized engagement affects national institutional systems, especially for the resource poorer open economies in the Maghreb and the Mashreq. This chapter analyses the context in which the remainder of this book is set and focuses on the dynamics of the enhanced engagement between transnational and national actors, with an emphasis on the civil service.

In this context, we will first review the historical patterns of integration of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa in the global economy. While we will look at trends in the region more broadly, we will focus specifically on countries that do not depend significantly on natural resource extraction while at the same time have more open economies and political systems, namely Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Second, to help us assess the impact of global engagement on civil servants in Parts II and III of the book (Chapters 3– 6), we will lay out contextual information on the origins and evolution of civil service systems in the region and the focus countries, then look at the specific role the public sector and civil service played in the critical post-independence years, and afterwards focus on the development of the civil service in the transition context.

Historically, the Middle East and North Africa has been a deeply internationalized region – a connection point between continents and cradle of civilizations. Yet the trajectory changed in the 19th and 20th century and saw the region increasingly marginalized. The years since the Second World War, and the advent of the emancipation and independence movements, then saw the region turning inward, driven economically by natural resource extraction and import substitution policies, and politically by regimes that were, with few exceptions, authoritarian, autocratic, and closed, with elements of cronyism and corruption (Schomaker and Bauer, 2020). A state-driven development model meant that public sector employment was dominant in the post-independence decades, and a public sector job was what many graduating youths aspired to.