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Neonationalism in the Modern Middle East

By Sherifa Zuhur

Introduction

Nationalism is an ideology supporting the creation of a nation-state.  Neonationalism is an ideology defining the projects of such a state, and a philosophy, or envisioned history that fosters loyalty to the state unit, rather than to family, clan, region, city, party, religious sect or other locus of identity.  Projects of the nation-state depend, of course, on who is at the helm.  

As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, nationalism is a curious phenomenon, much closer to a religion, or an ethnicity than other ideologies, such as communism, socialism, positivism, and so on.  He writes "It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it [nationalism] as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion,' rather than  with 'liberalism' or 'fascism.'" [1] He identified this problem as the "philosophical poverty" of nationalism. 

Yet, nationalism is nevertheless politically powerful.  It can be confused with patriotism.  In this emotional context, it may be wielded to enhance unity through specific narrations and simplifications of a nation-state's history and emphasis on the commonalities of its citizenry. When nationalist parties, stories, or policies stress continuities between current leadership and popular  past accomplishments, they aim to increase loyalty.

Anderson went further, and described the nation as an imagined, limited, community.  'Imagined' because it "lives in the minds" of fellow-nationals even when they do not know each other. It is limited because everyone recognizes boundaries to their national territory, although there may be disagreements as to the precise location of these boundaries. And, it is a community, despite inequalities and exploitation of sub-groups, because its members see it as a "horizontal comradeship," or a "fraternity". [2]  

Various scholars have applied Benedict Anderson's notions of the construction of nationhood to works of historical revision concerning the Middle East.  One concern was the chronology of national identity, in response to Zionist denials of a pre-existing Palestinian identity as in Rashid Khalidi's work. [3]    Some scholars have explored the significance of popular memory in national issues, for example, in Lisa Anderson's work on Libya, or in that of Sharif Kanaana  which shows that oral renditions of national history provide new sources of women's history. [4]   Nations might not be bounded in the modern linear sense, as we learned in the oral history of tribal "nations," [5] and in works on cultural imagery of particular nations found in cinema and music. [6]    Middle Eastern scholarship has illustrated Benedict Anderson's ideas about the composition and transmission of early nationalism, that  was enhanced via the importance of print media.     

But do "imagined communities" help us understand contemporary nationalism?  Can they help us interpret what I have termed  "neonationalism"  -- a condition and process that operates after the achievement of independence.    Eric Hobsbawn has presented a sophisticated history of nationalism and argues that the earlier European model of a "true" nationalism has given way elsewhere – for example, in the Middle East or Africa -- to irredentism, or identification of nationhood with singular ethnic (or religious) groupings.  I found his analysis very disturbing as were these words, when I first read them in 1990:

Nationalism, however powerful the emotion of being in

an 'imagined community' is nothing without the

creation of nation-states, and a world of such

states fitting the current ethnic-linguistic criteria of nationalism, is not a feasible prospect today. [7]

True, I was a regional specialist collecting new, and fairly specialized data in the region and usually testing it against the theories and notions of  other regional specialists.   True, also, that much grand theory in history and political science simply does not do a very good job of explaining the phenomena on the ground in the region (for a variety of important intellectual reasons).  If Hobsbawn was right, then some of the existing nations were "impossible" or at best, un-feasible.  The ethnic-linguistic criteria also describes the basis of Arab nationalism, a transnational doctrine that has waned in importance over the twentieth century. 

            My students were able to dismiss Hobsbawm because they disliked his suggestion that only the "older" European states had been founded with a proper conception of citizenship.    I could not dismiss him, as these views, along with the notion that the Arab states are arbitrary political creations resound not only in the academy, but in the media.   He is correct, I think in asserting that the proper basis of national loyalty will have to transcend any one ethnic or linguistic group in today's world.  

 I began thinking about how the several decades of writing on the nation-states of the Middle East in specialists' writings significantly varied from those of the Western grand theorists.  Work based on the region asks different questions and it is far more difficult for non-specialists to attain access to such ideas, or for specialists to reach any sort of general audience. 

Most country monographs focused on problems of national coherence, or lack of fit  with particular agendae (like democratization, or modernization).  These included the theory of the  "over-stated" or very large state structure with an unwieldy public sector, created in the interest of socialist or social welfare policies but impractical in the expansion of capitalist interests. 

Nazih Ayubi described the Arab states as falling into two corporatist categories:  one a more traditional model (Weber's patrimonial state) and the other, combining corporatist and militarist elements.  His ideas on the nature of the state emphasize, as did his title, Over-stating the Arab State, [8] that nation-states may be inappropriately embued with power they do not actually possess. Secondly, he made an important observation -- that the Western liberal model is not the only proven state structure, pointing to Japan as an alternative; and thirdly that Arab thinkers lean toward an idealized, ethicalist, culturally-specific model rooting power in the gesellschaft. [9]

 Within Ayubi's framework, Egypt has been a modernizing state, and one that spearheaded efforts toward democratization and political liberalization in the region.  However, these efforts have not necessarily strengthened the state, although they have enlarged its apparatus.

 Globalization and Neonationalism

More recently, scholars have begun to address the friction between nation-states and globalism, or the current term, globalization.   Kathryn Manzo has claimed  "that nationalism's relationship to global politics is inevitably paradoxical. . .  The twin concepts of national and alien cannot exist independently of each other; both are simultaneously brought into being by nationalist scriptures that operate as political religions." [10]   This curious and paradoxical relationship has been demonstrated through wars, xenophobia, and also in the heightened incorporation of Middle Eastern populations as consumers of global goods and ideas.   

However, as the Middle Eastern states moved beyond independence and state-building, there has not been an increase of regional cooperation, or rational in-region trade, in comparison to the demand for Western imports.  And in turn, Western imports along with national narratives have produced a crisis about cultural changes.  And new segments of local elites, or new elites altogether whose primary interests are supported by global industries, conglomerates or multinational penetration of local structures now exist. 

The stories of economic change, of shortages and deprivation along with new wealth are much more difficult to discern in the world press.  Instead, the "stories" focus around the supposed failures of the Middle East as a civilization to fit into the values of the West – as in Samuel Huntington's argument that the values of Western civilization cannot be found or developed in particular regions of the world. [11]   Similar arguments feature in virtually all general discussions of conflict with the region (curiously) as well as conflict between the region and the West.  And conflicts of the twentieth-century have involved national interests, arguments over national identity and other components of neonationalism

Terminology.

I use the term neonationalism in this work to explain the interaction of politics, economics, cultural modeling, and social ideas of nationhood at work in the region today.  It can refer to protectionist policies, or political stances versus other nation-states in the region.  I will refer to nationalism as the set of ideas and impulses operating prior to independence.   "Neonationalism" is not unremittingly negative, and it is tempered by other ideologies such as religious fundamentalism, ethnic and socioeconomic divisions.  The term has also been used by other scholars to mean post-colonial nationalism, and occurs regularly in studies outside the Middle East, or in cultural history. [12]   A pejorative meaning has more often occurred with reference to post-Cold war events and in the media, although one could apply the term to the United States as easily as to a Middle Eastern country.   Necessary evil, or not, we need a comparative term for theorizing today's Middle East, which is not monolithic, and no longer series of colonial possessions.  Although neonationalism may be expressed as Oren Yiftachel has explained for Israel as "ethno-nationalism" or "ethnocracy," these terms are not helpful in theorizing the state-society interactions in Lebanon, or Egypt, although they would fit Sri Lanka. [13]

Historians of the Middle East have focused for some time on the role of the urban elites, or notables in politics, and the continuation of that role in the nationalist movements against colonialism.  Then, after formal declarations of independence, the discussion of nation-states (and their governing philosophies) turns to descriptions of institutional construction, changes in the roles of particular social classes, and use of military elites in that process.   In and beyond state policy, we shall see that neonationalism:  1) incorporates a national political history, selecting and eliminating  details which portray the state in a dependent mode 2) pervades the cultural sphere, but rather unsuccessfully tries to fend off globalization and commercialization. Other ideas from the mainstream works on national identity and national communities also play a role in neonationalism.   

Tolerance        

Michael Walzer, suggests that a Middle Eastern state, like Lebanon, or a European state like Belgium is really a consociation.  And indeed, Lebanon developed its consociational modes of political operation from structures inherited from the Ottoman empire as well as local patterns.  According to Walzer, such states can never comprise the same models for citizenship and nationhood as those presented by the United States or France.  But, unlike Hobsbawm's implication that today's non-Western European states are irrational, Walzer sees that the most important function of the state is to create mutual tolerance amongst its citizens.  Tolerance, he writes, "sustains life itself," and it "makes difference possible, difference makes toleration necessary." [14] He is interested in the different methods of creating, or allowing for tolerance that arise from particular national forms – five to be exact: multinational  empires, international society, consecrations, nation-states, and immigrant societies. 

He then goes on to describe particular cases that are more complicated, and may comprise more than one of the forms he has described – in France, Israel, Canada and the European Community. [15]  He also explains how tolerance is limited by the existence of class, gender, and power distinctions.  Walker's aim is not the same as Hobsbawm's or mine, but in exploring neonationalism in the Middle East, I am particularly interested in its encouragement, or discouragement of tolerance.  What Walzer is not too concerned about, is the lack of Western tolerance for the specificity of historical structures of the Middle East.

Neonationalism versus Transnational Philosophies. 

It is true that both tensions and vague interactions exist between territorial nationalisms in the Middle East and Arab nationalism.  Similarly, territorial nationalisms have developed in an area where pan-Islamism was popular early in the twentieth century, and has enjoyed some resurrection in the contemporary Islamist movements. 

"Is Arab nationalism dead?  This question is as provocative as the parallel question of the Deity.  Despite a great deal of evidence that it is territorial nationalism that now funds neonationalist policies of the Middle east, a large strata of the population were deeply affected by different movements that proposed Arab nationalism – Ba'thism, Nasserism, and the work of various intellectuals, artists, and journalists inspired either by these movements or in aversion to the alternative of a Western-dominated world.    In the West, Arab nationalism has seemed far less comprehensible --  a rhetorical device, a knee-jerk. 

For individual  nationalisms to function, Arab nationalism – a transnational philosophy must be transitory, or invoked only at particular moments.

Sectarianism

Sectarianism has also proven particularly problematic for neonational policies and ways of thinking – in Lebanon, but also in Upper Egypt, and to some degree in Syria. Whether through creation of nationalist narratives, or better state stewardship of community relations, such sources of division can be overcome.  And these problems are not specific to the Middle East.  Walzer describes France as the "classic" (in Hobsbawm sense too) nation-state, and simultaneously a very large immigrant society.  Until now, he suggests, minorities were not organized, they tended to assimilate to the republican model of French identity before all else.  But today he points to the presence of North African Jews and Muslim Arabs who  "are not as ready as their predecessors were to surrender their children to state schools devoted to Frenchification." [16]   He is right to note an "uneasy standoff" – actually there have been many conflicts, over the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls, the activities, poverty and special argot of "les beurs."  However, the modern French national ideal has also frozen in time, and the history of the Gaulles is no longer the history of all of these citizens.  The popularity of racist neonationalism, whether in France, Germany,  the United States, or the Middle East is uncomfortable for all of us. 

*            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

This book is my effort to tell the stories of nationhood beyond the achievement of independence to those less familiar with the region, but to make some suggestions about their proper interpretation.   Although I have written a narrative of the events relative to nationalism, it would be impossible within the scope of this volume to write a 'deep" history of every country case.  I focus on those that I know best, through detailed research, or through a combination of  field experience, residence and research.  Readers can expect far more of the "great-man" sort of history than I would like to have written, but this is being done in order to synthesize the "national narrative" of each case, and then to interject certain questions.

In so doing,  I believe that a more accurate picture of neonationalism as it developed in the twentieth century can be discerned.   I also contend that although states may not fulfill their potential as unifying, or embracing identities, in the Middle East, they are as capable of toleration, and other benefits of association as in Europe.  Much however, will depend upon the vision of leadership, the ingenuity of civil society, and the interaction of nation-states and economies in the world over the next decades. 

 Efforts to reach a just solution in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians derive from competing nationalisms and the creation of one state at the expense of another.  But if we look in other ways at the region today, we see that stable growth and movement towards more literacy, better health, and an enhanced quality of life have also been afforded by the creation and sustenance of modern nations.   This same growth has proceeded unevenly thanks to nationalist struggles, civil war, the Gulf war, and the uncertainty of the tourist sector.   Some would argue that socioeconomic indicators have not much improved when considered along with inflation, higher costs of marriage and housing, and privatization.   What is certain is that nations will continue to meet new domestic and regional challenges with reference to the national imagery that has gathered credence over the second half of  the twentieth century.  That imagery feeds into neonationalism, and neonationalist policies in turn recreate and redefine national images.