Political Integration & the Failure to Sustain ‘Arab Nationalism’

Hussein Bazzi

There are multiple factors to consider whenever attempting to define a 'nation' and what unites it, such as historical roots, geopolitics and boundaries, or shared ethnic, linguistic, and/or religious identities. Although the MENA region is made up of many tribal, religious, and socio-economic groups, the defining characteristic of an ‘Arab Nationalism’ stretching across the Middle East and North Africa would have to be the shared ethnic and linguistic make-up during the transition to separate nation-states after the Arab world’s colonial period. However, many obstacles stood in the way of the realization of this vast political integration of the Arab world during the early development of these border-separated states and only multiplied as the decades passed.

The first major impediment to the existence of a single Arab Nationalism was inter-Arab power struggles and the balance between domestic state-building versus cooperation. In the fourth chapter of “State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East,” Roger Owen mentions the League of Arab States, which was created in 1945 as a union of Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon, as a manifestation of state-to-state cooperation that created much popular enthusiasm. However, this experiment failed because Egypt’s dominance during that time period pushed other states in the League into subservient roles. Owen mentions “the actual experience of Syrian union with Egypt” as an example of a country that was unhappy with Egypt’s imposing its will on the other states (p. 58). Later, after President Assad rose to power, he stated that he would never be “maneuvered into such a subservient position again” (p. 59).  In later decades, after the death of Nasser and Egypt’s economic and military decline, other states rose to prominence and different power balances emerged. Saudi Arabia became a financial power in the region while Syria had a growing political importance after the consolidation of the Assad regime. Other weaker countries experienced coups and instability, such as Lebanon that was unable to “contain the conflicting forces at loose on its own national terrain” (p. 63). With regards to the Lebanon example, their weakness as a state made them victims of their geopolitical situation, including their place in both intra-Arab and Arab-Israeli rivalries. Also, in terms of regional divides, there were geographical splits between the Arab world into the fragmented regions of North Africa, the heartland of the Arab world including Greater Syria and Iraq, and Eastern Arab states of the Gulf. A trend emerged where more powerful Arab states placed an emphasis on its own territorial nationalism to impose its legitimacy. These examples of the shape-shifting power struggles in inter-Arab relations are just a few of the many ways that visions of pan-Arabism took a backseat to geopolitics.

A second major reason that the Arabs could not unite under a pan-Arabism movement was the developments of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the ability of the Palestine issue to first unite Arab states and then later divide them. Early in the transition to independence, practically all Arab regimes were united for the Palestinian cause in the face of Jewish and British settlers. However, after Israel’s military dominance and their subsequent occupation of lands outside their state in 1967, the policies of Arab regimes towards Israel and Palestine began to diverge. Militarization of the Palestinians led to a mutually favorable relationship between Jordan and Israel as the Hashemite Kingdom wanted to rid its country of Palestinian guerrillas. On the other hand, the existence of the PLO in Lebanon pushed the unstable country into Civil War, ultimately the occupation of the small, vulnerable, and multi-sect country by Israel in 1982. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in1979; in contrast, Syria built its military capacity to be able to confront Israel and exercise influence over Palestinian nationalist movements. So, even the Arab-Israeli conflict eventually became a dividing factor in the Arab world after once being one of the few stances in which virtually all the Arab regimes agreed.

I do not envision a situation where there could be a supra-national entity of a pan-Arabism in the Modern Middle East for three major reasons. First, the discussion of creating an Arab Nationalism over the entire Arab world is now much more complex than it ever was. The first League of Arab States contained 5 members that failed in state-to-state cooperation. Now, there are over 21 Arab states stretching from North Africa through the Arabian Peninsula. Since the early transition from colonialism, countless developments and contradicting stances on any range of issues have come about making inter-Arab relations a remarkably complex web. Secondly, the important role of non-Arab actors in the region – Turkey, Iran, and Israel – have legitimate and even dominant amounts of influence on the region and have changed the geopolitics of the Arab world without being Arab. For example, Syria is aligned directly with Iran and would not sabotage that alliance for any other Arab state. Thirdly, the role of international proxy war has significantly changed the way power is brokered in the Middle East on an international level, beginning during the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. Aside from Israel, which is clearly the United States greatest ally in the region, many Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and the oil-rich Gulf countries have alliances with the U.S. On the other hand, ‘anti-western’ states such as Syria, Iran, and Iraq, were backed by the Soviets. However, since the beginning U.S. world hegemony after the Soviet Union’s collapse, countries backed by the U.S. have received tremendous financial assistance from the world power, while the Russian backed non-allies of Iran and Syria have been weakened by American foreign policy, and even sanctioned. This phenomenon has evolved into a deeper, regional, and bipolar struggle between the large and oil rich countries of Iran and Saudi Arabia.