Hello r/askhistorians
I apologise if my question is controversial, but it occurred to me the other day that the Arab states of the Middle East (in particular, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq don't exactly have a good track record with plenty of sectarian violence.
Furthermore, surveys have shown that citizens of those nations identify firstly with religion or ethnicity, and secondarily with the nation they are from.
Why is this the case? MY thoughts go to sykes-picot and the colonial administration, but there are plenty of examples that reject this notion.
Firstly, Indonesia - which is a country with a vast ethnic and religious landscape, has moderately fewer socio-political issues than the Arab states, despite being subject to Colonialisation under the Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese.
Secondly is the example of Iran. Although not religiously diverse, and although not technically "colonised", it has a ethnically diverse population - azeris and persians.
So why is it that some post-colonial states have prospered, and others are held back significantly by ethnic divisions? Why is nationalism given different weight across the world, despite the ethnic makeup of a country.
THansk,
EDIT: Specifically (Civic) Nationalism - why has it failed, whereas religious and ethnic Nationalism succeed?
Ok, so a bit of preface:
/u/throwmewaya questions the assertions of OP's question that the Arab Middle East does not have as strong a form of nationalism as Iran or Indonesia (and to which, if we're sticking with Muslim majority countries, we might also add, say Turkey, among others). While I think /u/throwmewaya is right to question those assertions, at a basic level OP, I think we can just stipulate it for the time being and ask questions more in the form of "How did nationalism in the Arab world develop, and why might it be weaker than in other cultural/historical regions?"
To answer that, though I'm not a political scientist and I don't deal with these kinds of high level theories very often, I want to just start with some working definitions of "nation" and "nationalism."
For nationalism I will turn to Eric Hobsbawm from Nations and Nationalism:
I use the term 'nationalism' in the sense defined by Gellner, namely to mean 'primarily a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.' I would add that this principle also implies that the political duty of Ruritanians [i.e. members of a given nation] to the polity which encompasses the Ruritanian nation [i.e. whatever their nation may be], overrides all other public obligations, and in extreme cases (such as wars) all other obligations of whatever kind. This implication distinguishes modern nationalism from other and less demanding forms of national or group identification which we shall discover.
For the definition of a nation I'll turn to Benedict Anderson:
[the nation] is an imagined political community -- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion....
The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind....
It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably congronted with the living pluralism of such religions....
Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
I'm plagiarizing someone here I'm sure, and it's included in a close reading of the above definitions but I would also add to this as a kind of short hand that we can assume that nationalism is ideologically oriented towards the creation of state consisting of the nation or in which the nation is dominant, in other words, towards the creation of a "nation-state."
Ok so that as preface out of the way, how is this applicable to the Arab world? How did it arise there?
Well firstly we can say that it arrived late. I think there's a case to be made for there being a kind of concrete nationalism in modern Egypt dating at least to the Urabist revolt if not earlier. But for the rest of the Arab world we're talking about, at its earliest, a kind of Arab nationalism emerging from the Hashemite-led Arab revolt of 1916-1918.
This point is nonetheless incredibly disputed. Where a good pan-Arab nationalist like George Antonius will, per the title of his own book, say that this revolt was an Arab Awakening, he stresses that actually there were all kinds of predecessor movements and secret societies that indicate that actually Arab nationalism was fully-fledged, if not quite yet viable, in the 19th century and certainly before the war.
While there were Arab cultural and sort of ethno-linguistic societies that were pushing for increased Arab or Arabic roles in the Ottoman system, as much as Antonius is respected I don't think there is much support for his portrayal of events. These were elite societies in urban centers that were resisting more indisputably nationalistic efforts of the Ottoman Empire to induce a "Turkification" of the empire. I don't mean to use this term in a negative sense, but to my reading their platform can more easily be described as xenophobic than nationalistic. Xenophobia can impel one towards independence, and may even be necessary to do so, but per the definitions we discussed before it is certainly not sufficient for a conception of a nation or of nationalism.
As it is, even during the Arab revolt when I think you can say that such a nationalism came into existence in more concrete form, that was not sufficient to gain the support of the Arab Ottoman populace, who, in rather blunt contemporary assessments by General Allenby recorded in the minutes of the 1919 peace talks, remained firmly on the Ottoman side for the duration of the conflict.
Here, in the post war settlement, I think we get to some, but not all, of the problem. Much has been made of the "Sykes-Picot borders" or of "European lines in the sand." I've written about these issues rather extensively on this sub before, but suffice it to say that:
That last point, I imagine, will generate the most skepticism. I don't mean to defend the imperialist nature of the post-war settlement in general terms, but I will defend it from being simply stupid. It was not. My best explanation of that is to take criticisms that sound similar but are actually two sides of a coin, as it were, of the Western Imperial approach in the region. The first criticism is that they didn't account for ethno-sectarian divisions when creating the states of the region. And the second is that they lumped together incoherent groups of people into historically arbitrary states.
Both criticisms are false. In French Syria, the French paid excruciating detail to ethno-sectarian division. To implement that, they actually sought to divide Syria into five nation-states. A Christian-majority "greater Lebanon", an Alawite state, a Druze state, and a state each for Damascus and Aleppo.
Now, the common wisdom today, by my reading, in the context of the Syrian Civil War, is that this would have been a great idea. You create nation states with careful respect for ethno-sectarian divisions. That ignores the fact that, given that chance, it was utterly and violently rejected by the Syrian people. In the end, only Lebanon was successfully carved out of the French Mandate of Syria, for reasons of a kind of Maronite nationalism and French support for that which I think I'll have to touch on in a part II of this post as I'm approaching the word limit.
The second argument, in regards to incoherent lumping, is in the British-backed formation of Iraq. Once again you have a state where, in the current common wisdom as represented by, say, Joe Biden, they should have divided country into ethno-sectarian parts. On the contrary, the British, with the full cooperation of the Hashemites, took exactly the opposite approach, and it worked. The British were cognizant that per the Hussein-McMahon correspondence that they owed a debt to the Hashemites. They knew that their own attempts to administer Iraq directly in the style of a colony had been a miserable failure, prompting the 1920 Iraqi revolt. So what they did, in the 1921 Cairo conference, was come up with the "Hashemite Solution" to the Iraqi problem. To quote Charles Tripp's A History of Iraq
Of the three million or so inhabitants of Iraq [in 1918]...more than half were Shi'i and roughly 20 per cent were Kurdish, with another 8 per cent [comprised a mix of other ethno-religious groups]...[and] Sunni Arabs...constituted less than 20 percent of the population.
What the British aimed to achieve was a three-legged stool. Under Sykes-Picot, Mosul province, where virtually all of the Kurds resided, would be French. That would leave a state that was overwhelmingly Shia Arab. But given Britain's Hasehmite promises, by including Mosul province you had a state that was 40ish% Sunni (enough for a Sunni king), 70% Arab (cetainly enough for an Arab king) and in which you could build a genuine nation by balancing Sunni Arabs and Kurds against Shia Arabs and Shia and Sunni Arabs together against separatist Kurds. It's too broad I think for the scope of this question, but oil certainly played a role as well as Mosul province was believed to have oil deposits, but at the time this was a positive thing and was part of the reason that Faisal wanted Iraq to look the way it did in the end, just to re-emphasize the concept of Arab agency.
Ok, looking at the word limit I think this will have to constitute background and form Part I of my response for now.
I'm not sure if this answers your question about nationalism in each individual Arab nation, but it is definitely related to your question.
There are many economic, religious, ethnic, etc. reasons for why Arab nationalism never fully took hold, but I am not well versed enough to talk about them. One particular cause that I feel is relevant and can discuss however is the overall dismal performance by the Arab world in its wars against Israel in the mid-late 20th century.
In the early & mid-20th century, an ideology of Arab nationalism began to take form which became known as the Pan-Arabism movement. At the head of this was Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had gained notoriety and respect in the Arab World for emerging as a political victor after the Suez Crisis. Nasser ultimately hoped to unite the Arab world against the West, and in particular against the Zionist Israel.
Accordingly, in the 1950s-1960s, Arab nationalism was at its peak, but was ultimately derailed by the Six Day War against Israel in 1967. The united efforts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon were not enough to defeat Israel, and the losses of the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, and the West Bank were all humiliating blows to the Arab world.
After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Camp David accords that were signed between Egypt and Israel, Egypt became the first Arab nation (though technically not Arab majority) to recognize Israel as a nation. This led to Egypt being banned from the Arab league until 1989. Without Egypt's support, the Arab goal of defeating Israel was ultimately abandoned, and the unity among the Arab nations that had been gained from fighting a common enemy slowly splintered.
Iraq went to war with Iran (not an Arab country, but shows the shift in Iraq's focus) in 1980, Syria and Lebanon fought against an Israeli invasion in 1982, while Jordan and Egypt remained relatively neutral, resulting in a divided Arab world in the 1980s that never again was able to attain the level of unity it had under Nasser.
Nasser: The Last Arab by Said K. Aburish.
I will rather openly admit that I don't really understand the question.
I thought Nationalism was the mindset that Ethnicity was important, and that each People should have their own Nation and all that. But then you argue against "Nationalism in the Middle East" by saying for example that minorities in Syria think it is more important to self-identify as say Kurdish or Yazidi before being Syrian.
If your question is in regards to 'Artificial' Nationalism - "Why do Kurds in Syria not identify as Syrians before being Kurds?" - or Pan-Nationalism - "Why do Arabs in Syria identify as Syrian before Arabs?" - that's in my opinion not the question you seemed to be asking.
This comment is not about Arab nationalism per se, but one could reasonably read the question as "why have non-Western polities failed to adopt the political culture of the West?" Also implicit in the question in the equation of nationalism with prosperity, as if accepting a certain political identity equates to economic and geostrategic stability.
I'm not trying to be dismissive at all, but it seems as though the question is so broad as to foreclose consideration of what different polities had to struggle against.
For example, you may want to look more closely into Indonesian history before you deem them a success. There is a lot of blood and oppression for which you appear to not be accounting. (Granted, they remain allied with the West so these histories are not as broadly shared outside of Joshua Oppenheimer's amazing documentaries).
In the end, the only answer is local. The non-Western world may have to adopt Western political and state structures, but in the end they are the majority of world's population and the world's polities. Perhaps it is time to revisit Perry Anderson's Imagined Communities if only to see the malleability of nationalism in different contexts.
In his book Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Philip Carl Salzman, anthropology professor at McGill University, argues that loyalty to the larger unit (the nation) is inhibited by claims of loyalty to smaller units (i.e. clan and tribe). This is reflected in, and supported by, endogamous and consanguinous marriage, i.e. marrying within the group, or marrying cousins. As you might expect, it is a controversial thesis.
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Firstly, Indonesia - which is a country with a vast ethnic and religious landscape, has moderately fewer socio-political issues than the Arab states, despite being subject to Colonialisation under the Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese.
It may appear to be so today, but modern Indonesia underwent significant rebellions and uprisings, and even today there is still significant tension between different ethnic groups. To give a few examples, see Aceh, West Papua, the Jakarta riots of 1998.
It has to be kept in mind that Java has had the greatest population for a very long time. At the time of independence, it was also the most developed. It was not always clear that Indonesia was to be one country. But the Dutch colonials did a fairly good job in controlling and/or suppressing anti-colonial movements. Many of the Indos -- the mixed Eurasians -- proposed to use Malay as the common language because it was commonly understood by the mercantile class and the educated natives. This over time became the Indonesian language.
When Indonesia declared independence, it still wasn't clear it would be one country. But Sukarno was able to convince many regional leaders to cooperate with him as they negotiated with the Dutch. The outcome of this was a Federal republic, in a form of union with the Netherlands, of which the unitary Republic of Indonesia was one of the constituent states. However, within a few years, due to weaknesses in the regional states, they were absorbed into the Republic of Indonesia.
Not all was well yet. There were major regional rebellions such as PRRI/Permesta in Sumatra and Sulawesi, Darul Islam in West Java, RMS in the Moluccas, separatists in West Papua, etc. Some were supported by the Dutch, some by the US. Not to mention the conflict with Malaya, brought about by Sukarno hewing to the myth of Majapahit and Nusantara as a rationale that Malaya should belong to Indonesia.
So nationalism is a very, very complicated issue in South East Asia, and Indonesia is a great example of how complex it is.
B. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946, 2005.
B.H.M. Viekke, Nusantara, 1943.
A. Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 2nd ed 2014.
J. Bresnan, Indonesia: The Great Transition, 2005.
R.E. Elson, Constructing the Nation: Ethnicity, Race Modernity and Citizenship in Early Indonesian Thought, Asian Ethnicity (2005) 6 (3): 145-160.