Comment: West Asian Peace Conference at Madrid, 1991.

Comment: West Asian Peace Conference at Madrid, 1991. (1997, 20 Marks)

The Madrid Peace Conference (30 October–1 November 1991) was the first time Israel sat face to face with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians. It was also the most serious attempt to build a regional order for West Asia. It was co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. It is best read as a product of the post-Gulf War unipolar moment, and as a test of whether functional regional cooperation could run ahead of a political settlement.

Context: why 1991 made Madrid possible

  • The 1991 Gulf War split the Arab world and discredited the PLO, which had sided with Iraq.
  • The Soviet collapse took away the Arab states’ alternative patron, so Washington became the only broker. Realists see Madrid as hegemonic peacemaking: George H. W. Bush and James A. Baker III turned military victory into diplomatic leverage.
  • The conference rested on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the formula of “land for peace”.

Design: the two tracks

  • Procedural ingenuity. Israel under Yitzhak Shamir refused to deal with the PLO, so the Palestinians came inside a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation led by Haidar Abdel-Shafi. The PLO guided them from outside. Each side could attend without conceding its core position.
  • The bilateral track put Israel opposite each Arab neighbour.
  • The multilateral track opened in Moscow in January 1992. It set up five working groups: water, environment, arms control and regional security, refugees, and regional economic development. This was West Asia’s closest approach to regionalism. It applied David Mitrany’s functionalism (A Working Peace System, 1943): cooperation on technical, low-politics issues builds habits that can later carry political settlement.

Outcomes

  • What Madrid opened. It ended the taboo on direct talks. That led to the secret Oslo channel and the Declaration of Principles (13 September 1993), and then the Israel–Jordan peace treaty (26 October 1994).
  • What failed. The Syrian track deadlocked over the Golan, and the Lebanese track depended on it. Syria and Lebanon boycotted the multilaterals. The arms-control group broke down by 1995, when Egypt insisted that Israel’s nuclear programme be on the agenda. The regional economic summits begun at Casablanca (1994) faded. After Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (November 1995) the multilateral track lapsed.

Why the regional track could not hold

  • Functional cooperation in Europe worked because defeat and occupation had already settled the political question of German power. West Asia had no such settlement.
  • Michael N. Barnett (Dialogues in Arab Politics, 1998) argues that Arab regimes put regime security ahead of regional identity. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver classify West Asia as a conflict formation, not a security community.
  • Israel wanted normalisation; the Arabs wanted land and statehood. Neither would pay first.

Legacy and present relevance

  • Madrid’s comprehensive regional framework later gave way to bilateral deals that bypass the Palestinians: the Abraham Accords (2020), which Saudi Arabia has still not joined.
  • After the Gaza war, the October 2025 ceasefire and the Board of Peace that Security Council Resolution 2803 endorsed in November 2025 are run by Washington, not by any regional body. The US–Israeli war on Iran in 2026 confirmed that the region still lacks a common security architecture.
  • India established full diplomatic relations with Israel on 29 January 1992, as the multilateral track opened. This was the root of its later de-hyphenated policy towards Israel and Palestine.

Conclusion

Madrid succeeded as a door-opener and failed as a regional architecture. It produced Oslo and the Jordan treaty, but its functional working groups could not survive the absence of a political settlement. That is Mitrany’s limit in its sharpest form. Three decades later, West Asian diplomacy still runs through great-power brokerage and bilateral deals, not through regional institutions.