As for this article, please refer to my yesterday's blog（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20131018）. (Lily)
（http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/reader/archives/arab-nationalism-mistaken-identity/）
The Triumph of the State
For the first time, it became possible to criticize the myths of Arabism, and to see the differences among Arabs not as “accidental” but as living realities, even deserving of respect. Lebanon’s most prominent historian, Kamal Salibi, criticized Arab nationalism for “deluding the general run of the Arabs into believing that the political unity they had once experienced under Islam was in fact an Arab national unity which they have subsequently lost, or of which they have been deliberately robbed.” This made it “difficult for them to properly accommodate to the political realities of the present.” Salibi called on intellectuals to discount the erroneous Arab nationalist view of this history as a united national march that went wrong at some point, and correctly assess it as the parochial history that it normally was: an account of so many different Arab regional experiences of one kind or another, fitting more or less into a general pattern. No Arab country today need feel any guilt about accepting its actual existence as a willful or unwillful departure from an Arab national historical norm. It is only when the Arabs succeed in ridding themselves of the highly idealized Arab nationalist vision of their past that they will be able to live together in the modern Arab world as a coherent political community whose various members relate to one another constructively and without reserve.32
After 1967, this once-surreptitious view could be pronounced openly, and laid the intellectual foundation for the growing self-confidence of individual states.
But that self-confidence rested as much on power as persuasion. Despite their difficulties on the battlefield, these states had mastered the technologies of domestic surveillance. The regimes realized that defeat left them vulnerable, and resolved to forestall any dissent by using these technologies to make the state ubiquitous. The approach largely worked. Unlike the defeat of 1948, which inaugurated a bout of instability, the even more humiliating defeat of 1967 marked the beginning of an era of unprecedented stability, even immobility. The flood of oil income that followed the 1973 war also permitted regimes to buy off dissent. The state had not only become legitimate, it had become omnipotent. In the words of one Syrian intellectual: “The cancerous growth of the state has been accompanied by the increasingly diminished power of everybody and everything else, especially what some Arab thinkers and leaders enjoy calling ‘The People.’” As a consequence, “Arab society is on the whole cancelled out as a reality of political significance in the reckonings of all Arab regimes.”33
By the time communism collapsed, the Arab lands had become the last preserve of protracted one-man rule, and so they remain today. The king of Jordan has reigned now for forty years, the king of Morocco for thirty-two years. Libya’s leader made his coup twenty-four years ago. The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has held his title for twenty-four years. Syria’s president has held power for twenty-two years. Iraq’s ruler has held sway over the country for twenty-two years, the last fourteen as president. The emir of Kuwait has reigned for fifteen years, the king of Saudi Arabia for eleven years. Egypt’s president has held office for twelve years. Not one of these states could be categorized as a democracy, although after 1967 they laid unprecedented claims to the loyalty of their citizens and subjects, and intruded upon virtually every aspect of society.
Only Lebanon, the perennial exception, proved incapable of enhancing its legitimacy and its power over society after 1967. In this birthplace of Arab nationalism, social peace had come to depend on equilibrium between the myths of “eternal Lebanon” and “one Arab nation.” The Maronites agreed to march in step with the Arabs, so long as they could carry the flag of Lebanon; the Muslims agreed to parade behind the flag of Lebanon, provided the parade marched to an Arab cadence. By this understanding, Lebanon would supply intellectual rationales for Arab nationalism; others would provide the soldiers for its battles. For a time the equilibrium held, and Lebanon established a quasi-democratic public order and a free-market economy. In times of regional crisis, Lebanon did its duty by words, and managed to dodge war with Israel. But after 1967, Lebanon began to lose its balance. The Muslims, wracked by guilt, demanded that Lebanon finally take up the Arab burden of Palestine, and open its southern border to attacks against Israel. The Maronites, awed by Israel’s example, thought they could turn the state of Lebanon into something comparable: a small powerhouse, armed to the teeth, defiant of the Arab world around it. In 1975, the situation exploded in civil war, and Lebanon virtually disappeared under a checkered map of militia fiefdoms, crisscrossed by green and red lines. The only lines that did not count were Lebanon’s borders, and both Syria and Israel entered the fray. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, it worked even more feverishly with its Lebanese allies to remake the country in its image, but to no avail. Since 1989, Syria has tried to do the same, with more resolve and success.
Aside from Lebanon, all other states exercised more confident power over their societies, and more independence from one another. Before 1967, Arab nationalism appeared to drain states of their legitimacy. After 1967, its slippage seemed to produce a surge of legitimacy that strengthened both states and incumbent regimes. This strength had severe limitations: Arab states still could not stand up to powerful external enemies such as Israel. But they could ward off interventions by one another, and enforce their will over their own societies with an almost ruthless efficiency.34
The Challenge of Islam
The voice of Islam also bid to fill the silence left by Arab nationalism. Arab nationalists had always regarded Islamic loyalty as a potential rival, and had tried to disarm it by incorporating Islam as a primary element in Arab nationalism. Even the Christians among them went out of their way to argue that Arab nationalism complemented rather than contradicted the Islamic loyalties still felt by so many Arabs. “The power of Islam,” affirmed Michel Aflaq, the founding ideologue of the Ba’th and a Christian by birth, “has revived to appear in our days under a new form, that of Arab nationalism.”35
But many Muslim Arabs saw this as a confidence game, and regarded Islam and any form of nationalism as mutually exclusive. For Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian ideologue of Islam who was executed by Nasser in 1966, Arab nationalism signified “spiritual decadence.” If the Prophet Muhammad had so wished, he “was no doubt capable of setting forth a movement of pan-Arab nationalism in order to unify the strife-torn tribes of Arabia.” Instead, he called all of mankind, Arab and non-Arab, to submit to God. The Arabs thus enjoyed no privileged standing in Islam, of the kind claimed by Arab nationalism: “God’s real chosen people is the Muslim community, regardless of ethnic, racial, or territorial affiliation of its members.” Reflecting on early Islam, Qutb concluded that the “sole collective identity Islam offers is that of the faith, where Arabs, Byzantines, Persians, and other nations and colors are equal under God’s banner.” During his police interrogation, Qutb announced that Arab nationalism had “exhausted its role in universal history.”36
The Islamic critique of Arab nationalism extended beyond its theory to its practice. Arab nationalism had erred in breaking the primary bond of Islam during the Arab Revolt — a bond that linked Arab and Turk. The Arab nationalists betrayed their fellow Muslims in order to side with the British, who naturally betrayed them — a just reward for those who placed their trust in unbelievers. The Arab nationalists then compounded their error by abandoning reliance on God and his divine law, in order to become liberals, fascists, and socialists, in mimicry of foreign ideological fashion. And while they professed respect for the faith of Islam, they filled their prisons with the truly faithful, whom they accused of subversion for preaching the word of God. Who did not doubt that the rout by the Jews, and the falling of Jerusalem into Zionist hands, constituted a punishment for straying from God’s path? Did not Israel itself prove the power of religion and state combined?
This brand of Islamic loyalty enjoyed an immense appeal among the members of two underclasses. The first was composed of Shi’ites, who formed a majority in Iraq and Bahrein, the largest single confessional community in Lebanon, and important minorities in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states. Arab nationalism acknowledged them as fellow Arabs, but it glorified precisely that “golden age” of Arab history that the Shi’ites mourned as disastrous, during which their heroes were martyred by the very same caliphs lionized in Arab nationalist historiography. In the present, the institutions of Shi’ite Islam, and even many Shi’ite families, straddled the divide between the Arab states and Iran, so that many Shi’ites regarded Arab nationalism as an artificial division, incompatible with the Arab-Persian symbiosis of contemporary Shi’ism. After Iran’s revolution in 1979, many Shi’ites in Arab lands identified so strongly with its success that they declared their allegiance to the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and repudiated both Arab nationalism and loyalty to the individual states in which they lived. Lebanon’s Hizbullah took this the furthest, professing absolute obedience to the leader of the Islamic revolution, and denouncing “the Arabs” for self-worship and their capitulation to Israel.
The other underclass consisted of the tens of millions of indigents who had abandoned the countryside and flooded into the cities, and whose lot worsened as populations grew and oil incomes fell. In the slums and bidonvilles of Cairo and Algiers, not only did the doctrines of Arab nationalism sound obsolete, but the promises of prosperity made by states also rang hollow to those in the grip of grinding poverty and unemployment. In growing numbers, the dispossessed gave their loyalty to Islamic movements that employed a more familiar vocabulary and called for the reinstitution of Islamic law as the panacea for all political, social, and economic ills. These Islamic movements were prepared to work within existing states, but only as matter of convenience. They professed loyalty only to Islamic law, and committed themselves to fight for its implementation wherever possible, even in distant Afghanistan, where many thousands of Arab Muslims fought as volunteers against Soviet forces and their “atheistic” Afghan clients. For these believers, their political community did not end at the border crossing of any state, or even where Arabic ceased to be spoken. It extended to any place where Islam reigned supreme or had to be defended.
In the void left by Arab nationalism after 1967, two ideas of community thus competed for primacy. On the one side stood those who argued that the inhabitants of any one state constituted a distinct people in a political sense. Regimes championed this idea, for it legitimized their claim to act solely in the interests of the state — identified increasingly with one ruling group or one ruler. On the other side stood those who believed that all Muslims constituted a universal political community, standing above any narrower political authority. This idea suited opposition movements, since it denied legitimacy to all existing regimes. An immense gap separated these two visions, but their adherents agreed on one point: Arab nationalism had failed irredeemably, having either been too broad or two narrow to satisfy the quest for identity.
Arab Nationalism Adrift
And what of the remaining Arab nationalists? After 1967, their numbers and influence steadily dwindled, except among intellectuals. Many intellectuals actually did live a pan-Arab reality. They wrote in Arabic for an audience that stretched “from the Ocean to the Gulf,” and published in pan-Arab journals that circulated just as widely. They jetted from capital to capital for conferences on the state of the Arabs. They had one foot (and sometimes both) in the West, where the freest Arabic press and publishing houses did their business. In this rarified atmosphere, the myths of Arab nationalism could still be sustained. For the most part, these intellectuals did not regard the defeat of 1967 as a failure of their idea, but rather as a failure of its implementation by others, who were criticized for not being sufficiently radical or sufficiently ruthless. Much of the Arab nationalist “self-criticism” after 1967 pushed even further toward advocacy of violent change. But intellectuals lacked an Arab Bismarck who would revive an idea whose time had come and nearly gone. Nasser had faltered, and in 1970 he died. The Ba’th in Syria, after more twists and turns, came to rest in 1970 under Hafiz al-Asad, a master of realpolitik who put Syria above all. For lack of better alternatives, Arab nationalists fixed their hopes first on the Palestinians, and finally on Saddam Hussein.
The Palestinians were a desperate choice, since they themselves had largely despaired of other Arabs. At the height of Nasser’s powers, they had allowed themselves to believe in him, and to see him as their redeemer. Nasser also prompted the creation of the PLO in 1964, under the auspices of the Arab League. But even before the Arab armies collapsed in 1967, Palestinians had begun to transform the PLO into an instrument of their own. The dominant Fatah component had no pan-Arab pretensions. Fatah demanded the moral support of the Arab states, and even exterritorial zones of operation, especially along Israel’s frontiers. It was prepared to fight to assure the independence of these bastions. But it promoted no message of Arab revolution, and it gave first priority to the establishment of a Palestinian “entity,” presumably a state, which would fit into the existing Arab state system.37
But other Palestinian groups took a different course, announcing they would work to topple the “petty bourgeois regimes” of the Arab states as a stage in their struggle to liberate Palestine. This was the pan-Arab promise of the so-called Arab Nationalists Movement and its most flamboyant offspring, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), both founded by students at the American University of Beirut. Their high-strung rhetoric and hijackings made them the heroes of many Arab intellectuals who, like their New Left contemporaries in the West, demanded “revolution” now.
The fedayeen, the Palestinian guerrillas in the rock-strewn hills opposite Israel, became the symbols of this struggle. Living on the edge and citing Mao and Guevara, they were themselves celebrated in poetry and song by the pan-Arab intellectuals. But although the fedayeen sought to imitate the methods of guerrilla warfare that succeeded elsewhere, they completely failed to liberate any part of Palestine or the Arab world, and they provoked Jordan’s ruthless suppression in 1970. As Jean Genet recorded, the Palestinian “revolution” could be summed up in the phrase, “to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second.”38 As the second passed, Arab nationalist enthusiasm for the Palestinian fringe waned, and even the fringe finally endorsed the mundane demand for a Palestinian state alongside Israel — one more Arab state, prepared to make one more compromise. “Our future is with Israel,” the spokesman of the PFLP, Ghassan Kanafani, told a French academic in 1970 — two years before his assassination by Israel. “Neither Europe, nor China, nor the Soviet Union, nor the Arab states, collectively or individually, are interested in us or would do anything decisive for us.”39 The Palestinian uprising that began in 1987 in the West Bank and Gaza was just that: a Palestinian uprising, relying not on the massive quantities of arms in Arab arsenals, but on stones and knives. The Palestinians would fight their own fight, in an effort to win the far more valuable sympathy of the West.
The choice of Saddam as the pan-Arab hero represented an even more desperate step. If anything, Saddam had done more than any modern Iraqi ruler to cultivate a specific Iraqi loyalty, drawing upon the legacy of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. In art, architecture, and poetry, the state encouraged the use of Mesopotamian motifs, and it lavished funds upon archaeological digs and restorations. Since no loyalties had survived from antiquity (which well predated the Arab conquest), all Iraqis could be accommodated by the Mesopotamian myth — Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites. After Saddam blundered into war with Iran in 1980, Iraq billed herself as defender of the eastern Arab flank against the Persian hordes — all the better to justify the demand for war loans from Gulf Arab states. But Saddam was no ardent pan-Arabist, and in 1982 he dismissed the pan-Arab vision as an idea whose time had passed:
The question of linking unity to the removal of boundaries is no longer acceptable to present Arab mentality. It could have been acceptable ten or twenty years ago. We have to take into consideration the change which the Arab mind and psyche have undergone. We must see the world as it is. . . . The Arab reality is that the Arabs are now twenty-two states, and we have to behave accordingly. Therefore, unity must not be imposed, but must be achieved through common fraternal opinion. Unity must give strength to its individual partners, not cancel their national identity.40
Those twenty-two states, on which unity “must not be imposed,” included Kuwait.
In 1990, Saddam’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, declaring it a province of Iraq. Possession of Kuwait would have filled the Iraqi treasury in perpetuity (a treasury that held a cash reserve of $30 billion back in 1980 but groaned under a debt of more than $100 billion a decade later). Significantly, Iraq did not formally justify its invasion as an act of Arab nationalist unification. Iraq claimed that Kuwait belonged properly to the state of Iraq, and that the annexation asserted an Iraqi legal right, not an Arab moral claim. But Arab nationalists seized upon Saddam as though he were a reincarnation of Nasser, and an improvement at that, for being far more reckless and ruthless. While he lacked Nasser’s charm, he had oil, missiles, nerve agents, and nuclear potential — power, he hinted, that would be put at the service of all the Arabs. He would be their sword, much like the four giant swords he had cast for his victory arches in Baghdad, dedicated at a ceremony in 1989 during which he paraded upon a white horse.41
Hichem Djaït, the preeminent Tunisian historian, exemplified the euphoria of the intellectuals. In 1978, in a sober mood, he wrote that “it would not be healthy to pin all hopes on achieving some sort of absolute unity,” and that an attempt by any Arab state to use its power for that purpose would be “not only dangerous but doomed to failure.” No Arab state had sufficient power to effect such unity, and no Arab could “entertain the notion that America, Europe, or Russia would allow so cohesive a unity to be founded in the heart of the Old World.”42 The analysis makes perfect sense to this day, yet Djaït threw it to the winds after Saddam annexed Kuwait. Thanks to Saddam Hussein, he declared, “a new perspective is opening up, that of unification. And Iraq is its pole and motor.” If that meant war, or even defeat, it still represented a start:
I don’t have to tell you, as Europeans, that your nations were born out of wars. In annexing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein has entered the dynamics of history. He was trying to make sure of a source of wealth for himself, material means. In addition, he was undertaking the beginning of the unification of the Arab world. Sometimes legitimacy is more important than legality.43
“Our goal let us seek by the edge of the sword / For our goals we pursue are thus surely secured.” This verse from Yaziji’s ode of 1868 anticipated the preference for coercion that ran beneath the surface of Arab nationalism. Once its slogans no longer swayed millions, Arab nationalism gave up even the pretense of persuasion, to worship raw power. But Saddam had not amassed enough of that power; despite incredible military expenditures, Saddam’s Iraq, like the Palestinian fedayeen a generation before, could only be “dangerous for a thousandth of a second.” In the end, Djaït was right when he wrote in 1978 that an attempt by any Arab state to force unity would be “doomed to failure.” In battle, the Iraqi “motor” of unification immediately broke down, and the scenes of surrendering Iraqi soldiers and burned-out armored columns recalled nothing so much as the defeat of 1967. And in the end, Saddam was right when he said in 1982 that the “Arab mind and psyche” would not accept the imposition of unity or the removal of existing borders. Most of the Arab states joined the international coalition against him, to uphold a state system that had become their own, even if it originated long ago in an imperial partition. And it was not only Arab governments that rejected the invasion: the publics in the Arab coalition states, according to polls, never took Saddam seriously as a pan-Arab savior.44 The Arab nationalists called 1991 a defeat of the Arabs as a whole, analogous to 1967. But it was not analogous. In 1967, three Arab states were defeated, Arab territory was lost to foreign occupation, and all Arabs felt humiliated. In 1991, only Iraq was defeated, the sovereignty of an Arab state was restored, and millions of Arabs in Casablanca, Cairo, Damascus, and Riyadh considered themselves the victors.
In the war’s aftermath, the United States, the Arab states, and Israel moved to translate that victory into a new regional order that would represent the ultimate undoing of Arab nationalism. That order, Middle Eastern rather than Arab, and would include Israel as a legitimate state among states, to be recognized by all Arab states following a negotiation of peace and a definition of Israel’s borders. The new order would also include Turkey, and perhaps other states that wished to define themselves as Middle Eastern. The rationale for the idea of the Middle East, made most fully by some Cairo intellectuals, argued that the Arab nationalist vision had become anachronistic. It was ideological in a post-ideological age, and it pressed for continuation of a costly Arab cold war against Israel, although the Arabs could no longer count on any outside support following the end of the Superpower Cold War. The moment had come to shift priorities to the domestic agenda of economic growth, lest the Arab world sink under the weight of its swollen populations. As the unification of Europe seemed to demonstrate, the economic future belonged to regional formations composed of many nations. These cooperated to promote economic growth and collective security, relieving economies of the massive burden of military expenditure. Water, arms control, the environment, trade, tourism — these and hundreds of other issues could not be negotiated to a resolution by the Arabs alone. Arab states were also Middle Eastern states, and while they belonged to an Arab state system, they also belonged to a Middle Eastern regional order. The shape and content of that order would evolve over time; a first step would be the progress of Arabs and Israelis at the negotiating table.45
The idea of the Middle East as a framework of identity faces many obstacles. It has nothing like the depth of the idea of Europe. The Middle East is a term that was first put into wide currency by an American naval strategist, who in 1902 described it as “an indeterminate area guarding a part of the sea route from Suez to Singapore.”46 It remains a colorless and inaccurate term, but the idea of an Arab nation “from the Ocean to the Gulf” is no older, and the term Middle East passed long ago into common Arabic usage. Its translation into an organizing principle of regional relations would constitute the final triumph of the real map over the imaginary map. All now depends on adding the last touches to the real map — the mutually agreed borders that will define Israel.
(To be continued.)
