Arab Nationalism & MENA Political Intergration

The Arab awakening first originated during the 19^th century as a revolutionary movement against the Ottoman Empire. During this period, Arab countries based their identity more on religion than on the common language. However, after WWI of Arab nationalism, became a significant ideology meant to guide Arab countries and reunite them due to their similarities: culture, language, and customs. Therefore, the Arab identity is meant to empower the newly independent countries from outside forces. Although this pertinent ideology was very popular between 1950-60, the popularity of Arab nationalism began to decline after the Six-Day War, leading this latter to slide towards political marginality.

There are, and unfortunately, many factors that work against the political integration of the MENA region. At that time there were various conflicting obstacles such as different loyalties and different interests. At present moment, there are even more obstacles and tensions between Arab countries that would prevent them from reaching political integration. For instance, a simple example, if Arab countries were to be integrated, Algeria and Morocco would need to agree on the issue of Western Sahara, which is impossible. This issue has been going on since 1963 and the diplomatic relations between the two countries are somehow shaken and witnessing many challenges. For example, the borders between the two countries are closed. If a simple bilateral relation is not possible, how can we be politically integrated?

Additionally, the idea of integrating Arab countries into one political union is not a new one. AMU, the Arab Maghreb Union, is a trade agreement between Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia aiming for economic and political union. However, AMU is stagnant due to the persisting Algerian-Moroccan issue. If the previous efforts to reunite just the Maghreb have failed so far, I do not envision reuniting both Maghreb and Mashreq under one Arab identity especially when we take more complex problems into consideration such as the Israeli-Palestinian issues.

Finally, regarding the EU model. I believe the aftermath of the Euro-crisis illustrated the complexity of this model. Having such a union made the euro zone countries very dependent of one another and prone to domino effect. The crisis showed that integrating weak southern economies to strong northern economies such as France and Germany made ECB in a conflicting position when it comes to setting an efficient interest rate and acceptable debt ratio. In other words, I do not envision a political/economic union because from what we learned from the euro crisis. Assuming we solved all the current persisting political issues, different countries are at different phases of the economic cycle some are ongoing a recession, others are booming. Thus, each country needs specific set of micro and macro economic policies that are specific to its own need. Having a central bank like ECB imposing the same policies on each country would just not be effective.