The Fatal Flaw in Pan-Arabism

Pan-Arabism is an ideology promoting the political and cultural unity of countries in North Africa and Western Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. Emerging in the late 19th/early 20th century, it asserts that Arabs constitute a single nation linked by language, culture, and shared history, often seeking to overcome colonial-era borders. Rooted in the Arab awakening (Nahda) against Ottoman rule, it later became a movement against Western colonialism.

Pan-Arabism is a political movement emerging in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and reaching its acme in the 1960s, which advocated the political, cultural and socioeconomic unity of Arabs across the different states that emerged after decolonisation, from the Mashreq (Arab East) to the Maghreb (Arab West). In that sense, it is a movement eminently tied to colonial and postcolonial history, indeed arguably conceived of indissociably from it. Pan-Arabism is, however, a more complex and layered phenomenon, subsuming these regional "sub-nationalisms"; it was also an at-times-fully-articulated ideological movement taking the form principally of a secular and socialist expression, as in the case of Ba'athism. Importantly, it was driven by middle-class and bourgeois urban actors rather than working class or peasantry/Bedouin ones in the different Arab countries where it manifested itself, and was notably used by the military to secure political control over the nascent state systems in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Algeria in particular. Both in its call for Arab unity and its role in combating the colonial powers (British, French, Italian and Spanish), it was similarly inherently anticolonial and, from the 1970s onwards, anti-imperial, explicitly against the United States' policies in the region. In this research, I argue that in spite of such important anchoring in Third Worldism and anticolonialism, pan-Arabism "failed" in aligning itself with the larger Global South struggle in which it was ensconced during its heyday, circa Suez 1956.

The Fatal Flaw in Pan-Arabism: MENA nations share a common language and a religion and history of conquest and conversion by other Muslims but they do not share a genetic basis and they live in different areas and environments with different needs and different governments whose authoritarian rulers (there has been no "Arab" democracy) will not voluntarily relinquish power to others and govern for their own benefit.