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...force has been given further impetus by the imperative to justify current US Middle Eastern policy. The fallacies that inform reductionist and hostile approaches to pan-Arabism, including the assumption that it is inherently racist and totalitarian, are here dissected and contextualised, and the evolution of pan-Arab nationalist thought is illuminated in the process.
Keywords: Baathism, Islam, Middle Eastern studies, pan-Arabism
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The Bush administration's effort to justify its invasion of Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein's government was so heinous that its possession of weapons of mass destruction or its links to al-Qaida are irrelevant has been challenged by many commentators. There is nevertheless parallel effort of comparable shabbiness that is likely to remain largely unchallenged, at least in the mainstream of American and British intellectual culture in which it is now receiving a respectful and often favourable hearing. I refer to the demonisation of pan-Arab nationalism found in such recent publications as Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman and Occidentalism: the West in the eyes of its enemies by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. (1)
The argument in these and comparable writings in respect to pan-Arab nationalism consists of two themes--that this nationalism has been inherently totalitarian and racist, and that it has been a dismal failure. 'Baathism', write Buruma and Margalit, in words that are repeated almost verbatim from work to work, 'the ideology of the Syrian and former Iraqi governments, is a synthesis, forged in the 1930s and 1940s, of fascism and romantic nostalgia for an "organic" community of Arabs. It was developed, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of World War I, by such thinkers as Sati Husri and Michel Aflaq, founder of the Baath Party in Syria.' According to these authors, al-Husri was a 'keen student of German Romantic thinkers such as Fichte and Herder' who had promoted the idea of an anti-Enlightenment volkisch nation, rooted in blood and soil, and he was directly inspired by the pan-Germanism of fascist circles in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s and by the idea of asabiyya, or '(Arab) blood Solidarity', developed by Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. (2)
We are led to believe that the ideas of the Baathists and other pan-Arab nationalists (in a review of Berman, Buruma links them with Islamists, Indian fascists, Russian Slavophiles and other 'enemies of liberalism' (3)) were bad in themselves and that their rule has been predictably calamitous. Berman argues that the Arab/Islamic movements had nightmarish results, 'fully as horrible as the fascism and Stalinism of Europe'. Other commentators might speak more responsibly and judiciously, but rarely with anything good to say. 'Nasser's achievements and those of his followers [radical pan-Arab nationalists more generally] turned out to be sparse', Sir Lawrence Freedman wrote in the Financial Times on 26 January 2004. 'Their revolutionary drive foundered as the conservative regimes held their ground. The reality of Arabic unity remained far short of the rhetoric ... Economic policies were disastrous ... Survival has been the result of ruthlessness and repression, but also political agility.' (4)
The discussion that follows is limited to the more egregious omissions and commissions.
The demonisation of pan-Arab nationalism as found in Berman, Buruma, Margalit et al. owes much to the hoary distinction made by Harold Acton and then Hans Kohn between a benign nationalism (sometimes designated as patriotism) that is civic, contractual and liberal, and whose policies are peaceful, moderate, measured and calculated, and an organic nationalism that is based on ethnicity or race and that is prone to violence and tyranny. In the late nineteenth century, Acton argued that the Teutonic nations (Britain, Germany and the US) had the good nationalism and that the Latin nations had the bad, and in the mid-twentieth century, Kohn believed that the Americans and British had the good nationalism and that the Germans, the Eastern Europeans and the Africans and Asians had the bad. (5)
Elie Kedourie played a leading role in introducing this discourse into the field of Middle Eastern studies. According to Kedourie, nationalism itself is an unnatural style of politics in which existence is envisaged as an organic whole rather than as disparate and disconnected parts. Kedourie condemns, in particular, the German variety of nationalism, which he contrasts to the 'patriotism' of the British and Americans. Patriotism is shorn of 'a particular doctrine of the state or the individual's relation to it'. It is love of one's country and loyalty to its institutions. In fact, the label 'nationalism' should only be attached to German nationalism and its transmutations in the rest of the world. In Asian and African regions, this nationalism remained entirely alien. Initiated by a handful of western-educated young men, estranged from their own society and their scrupulous European masters, this nationalism spread by imposition and imitation, with destruction, brutal murder and persecution of minorities as the result. (6)
Proceeding on the basis of such an understanding, Kedourie argues that the Egyptian and Syrian pioneers of pan-Arab nationalism lacked 'a sense of concrete difficulties' and possessed faith in sedition and violence and a contempt of moderation. They believed in an authoritarian state 'that would transform the heterogeneous, fissiparous, skeptical populations of the Fertile Crescent [and Egypt] to the likeness of their dream, with all the differences suddenly annihilated and external unity the emblem of a deeper, still more fundamental unity: one state, one nation, one creed'. (7)
Although Kedourie and other authors of his generation and persuasion produced their most important works in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, their interpretations are now undergoing a revival within Middle Eastern studies, (8) a revival that finds a parallel in works that are broader in scope (Terror and Liberalism and Occidentalism: the West in the eyes of its enemies denigrate pan-Arab nationalism as part, albeit a very important part, of a larger, undifferentiated, non-western 'anti-liberalism') and geared to broader audiences.
The principal weakness of this 'Kedourian' tradition, apart from the gross misrepresentations of the actual history of pan-Arab nationalism to which it is prone, lies in the fact that the basic distinction between an 'organic', racial/ethnic nationalism and a 'civic', contractual nationalism is untenable. In the first place, civil society is virtually indefinable. It is very difficult to establish a clear theoretical distinction between society and the economy or between society and the political state. In capitalist societies, for example, many coercive functions that once belonged to the state have been relocated to the private sphere in private property, class exploitation and the market. (9) Secondly, and as Bernard Yack has argued, the political community of so-called "civic' nations is not the result of a rational and freely-chosen allegiance of citizens to a set of principles. The United States or other 'civic' nations took shape because they had particular cultures linked to their particular histories and serving as the basis of their discrete identities. Moreover, even if these nations were based on shared political principles, they might exclude those suspected of rejecting these principles. (10) The myth of the peaceful and humane nature of 'civic' nationalism is perhaps most vulnerable when one thinks of the atrocities committed against the 'civic' nations" working classes or their people of colour, or the foreign "other'. The Baath Party did not bring us the destruction of Native American and Vietnamese societies. As Edward S. Herman has argued in an astute review of Terror and Liberalism, the distinction that Berman and others seek to make between an inherently peaceful American liberal political culture and an inherently violent Arab/Islamic totalitarian political culture has 'a number of problems', including the fact that 'US liberalism is attached to an...
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