Arab Nationalism(s): Rise and Decline of an Ideology

It is difficult and incorrect to approach the complex issue of the definition of Arab nationalism without providing, at least in broad terms, an examination of how nationalism was born and has developed in Europe, because there is no doubt that, in the Arab world, nationalist ideas and movements are connected to the ideology, the results and the example of European nationalism. To start from the comparison with the European model is important to consider if this model has successfully been applied to the Arab context or if nationalism has been an exogenous ideology forcibly and artificially introduced in Arab context. When speaking of Arab nationalism, at least three phenomena, only partially distinct from one another, must be identified: Arabism, Pan-Arabism and Nationalisms on a local basis. The first is Arabism (‘uruba, being Arab) is the sense of belonging to the same world, in a single context from Morocco to Iraq, that emerged in Egypt and Near East in the last decades of the XIX century. From this cultural awareness of Arab identity, the Pan-Arabism (qawmiyya ‘arabiyya) developed in the interwars period, but especially after the Second World War. Finally, with the acquired national Arab independences, Nationalism emerged on a local basis, and took the name of waṭaniyya. The debate, which we try to give in synthesis, has never closed and all the major questions are open: if an Arab nation (and therefore an Arab nationalism) has ever existed; if we can talk about a Pan-Arab nationalism once local based nationalisms emerged; which are the ideological principles of Arab Nationalism that are not uncritically assimilated from outside; finally, how and why the nationalistic ideologies have suffered an heavy crisis in front of the impressive rise of contemporary radical Islamism after the Seventies. Today the figure of the global jihadist, not tied to this or that national cause but fighting anywhere you have to fight a ǧihad in the way of God, is the antithesis of the militant of nationalistic movements, for the absolute disregard for any cause that can be defined national. The goal is the creation of an Islamic State, no matter how utopian this project is, not based on the concept of nation but on that of umma. It’s the phase of the “après panarabisme”: the myth of cohesion from the Gulf to the Atlantic no longer enchants Arab people and Arab States, and the era of Nasser and the Ba‘athist dream has finally ended.