As someone who holds a high affinity towards the aims of Pan-Arabism, I must admit with a heavy heart that Pan-Arabism is dead in the water. The last Pan-Arab state, Syria, fell over a year ago to Takfeeri extremists, and by that point its commitment to the concept was ideologically drained. Perhaps the future will necessitate Pan-Arabism’s revival along with a turn towards socialist politics but frankly I don’t think that’s happening nor do I think it’s what socialists in the region should be doing agitprop about.
In my opinion, the biggest issues with Pan-Arab thought was the different strains that came about due to different material conditions, leading to an inconsistent ideology. Syrian Pan-Arabs had to contend with the various minorities in their territory along with the results of the Ottoman ethnic cleansing campaigns, morphing into the Baath. Egypt in North Africa often put its semi-colonial interests towards other African states above liberation and its largely bourgeois foundations stifled communist movements in the region, such as in their own borders and Yemen. Libya was significantly more concerned with nomadic African tribes then its neighbor, taking the best ideological line that Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism were compatible. Iraq’s right-wing Baath turned more chauvinistic then their Syrian counterpart, and Sadaam’s play towards Iranian Ahwaz set the region back by decades in an attempt to “unite Arabs”.
Then there’s the monarchies, who obviously haven’t even gotten to the Republican step of Pan-Arab development. That’s an entirely new set of conditions that let alone the fact that the UAE is 80% immigrants, largely non-Arab migrants from the subcontinent.
In my opinion Communists should be agitating towards local confederatations based on regional factors. For example the in the Levant, it’s my view, that revolutionaries should call for a Pan-Syrian confederation between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. The three countries all border Israel, all suffer due to the expulsion of Palestinians, two have large minority populations which shape the politics whether officially or unofficially, and one still has a monarch in power. All the states would benefit from the destruction of sectarianism which causes a large portion of their internal disputes.
In the case of the peninsular monarchies, honestly I don’t see anything happening, but an end to monarchism and shift towards some form of Republicanism would be best, though you’d have to ask the scant few Khaligi comrades there are. Political development has been stunted immensely in the peninsula.
I’d say Egypt should throw more weight behind Pan-Africanism, with a specific context towards being the bridge to Asia.
Iraq needs the US to fuck off and stop occupying the north especially with the Kurds.
That’s just my analysis though, so if any other comrades have something to add, then I oblige you.
You’ve touched on it a little bit, but could you share your thoughts and analysis more specifically on Nasser’s Egypt and the efforts with Syria and Iraq, etc.?
Or if you have recommended readings on the subject I could delve into it myself.
I can’t speak to an internal analysis of Nasser’s Egypt as I’m not as educated on the matter with is why I was so brief. What I can say is that there were definitely parts of Egyption soceity which benifeted from colonialism against Sudan during both the Ottoman and Britsh colonial eras.
Nasser purged Communists during his rule and this one of the factors that led to conflict with Syria during the United Arab Republic. Syrian Communists like Khalid Backdash, who themselves were outcasts to some degree, were concerned about the Union due to Nasser’s near absolute influence over the federations direction, and feared a similiar purge happening to them, which works end up happening.
The secession of Syria was unpopular, and led to the Baathist coup in 1963, but when Hafez Assad came to power in 1970, the Communists were allowed into the government as a part of the National Progressive Front.
I’m more educated on Syria so my perspective of Nasser tends to come front there.
Yeah, I’m not very well-read on the non-aligned movement as a whole, and I don’t have any material lined-up on my reading list to expand on it.
I’m hoping to find some resources to better understand the context, and potential mistakes that were made during that time and in that region specifically.
Thanks for your input :)
No. never. Assuming everyone are Arab is the first wrong thing to do. Another problem is geography. Egypt, Palestine, Saudi arabia etc. they all have different dialects and geography struggles uniting everyone in one union would be the end for “Arab” people.
For example, Palestine, syria and Egypt can merge in to one state but Saudi Arabia can’t join that state due to irrelevance of geography.
Might that imply that pan-Arab parties are possible, though? Rather than unifying these different dialects and geographies under a single polity, form a federation of cooperation between national struggles. That’s sort of what pan-Latin parties are attempting, rather than recreating Gran Colombia they just want a unified political and economic bloc between equal partners.
There’s an Arab league for this but we need to question it how it really functioned. For example, Palestine. That league didn’t do a work something to stop the genocide in Palestine. Although, that league have a sub-imperialist countries like UAE and Saudis. In a better organized union that states would turn into a trojan horses of the union to undermine the union. We’re getting the same place again and again. Imperialism is the first contradiction to resolve in the third-world countries.
I wish a pan-Arab bloc existed but a geography that have so much oil, imperial states would everything to dissolve that union or invade.
Yeah, oil and gas basically make solidarity impossible.
I think that’s going to change if/when the world moves away from fossil fuels (and so the material basis for imperial extractivism erodes), but it might not be possible until then.
We aren’t going to be able to have regional unity as long as oil remains a vital resource. It creates power imbalances between different Arab countries, and obviously invites imperial meddling to prop up reactionaries to superexploit the nation for resources.
China is weaning itself off of oil, though, and other countries will follow. This will totally change the region in ways I can’t imagine.
Ever is a very long time so hard to tell, but given the difficulties of forming and maintaining a communist party inside most countries, be them Arab or not, I have a hard time seeing this happening in the absence of a very impactful event that empowers some communist organizations in the region, and to be fair impactful things are happening quite frequently lately so who knows, but the current tendency as I see it, and I’m quite far from a geo politics specialist, much less specifically of the Arab region, I think the tendency is not leading to that direction
There actually was an Arab communist country that existed which is now known as South Yemen. Which officially became a Communist state after the Corrective Move. It eventually reunited with the north like Germany and sadly no longer exists. The YSP still does but it is no longer Marxist-Leninist though. (Also why does the flag look like the nazbol one?) (I am also not mentioning Somalia because of the Ogaden War.)
