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Pan-Arabism and the Arab State in Arab Eyes
| Article
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19922 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
4,887 Words |
| Author
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Adeed Dawisha
Adeed Dawisha, who was born in Iraq, is professor of political
science at George Mason University. Among his recent books
are The Arab Radicals (New York: Council on Foreign Relations,
1986) and, in Arabic, Nation State and Integration in the Arab
World, co-editor (Center for Arab Unity Studies, Beirut,
1990). |
It was not so unusual, that night in July 1958, for tanks and armored vehicles to rumble their way through the dusty streets of Baghdad, the capital of Hashemite Iraq. If some of the residents of Baghdad, who slept on the rooftops of their houses to escape midsummer's stifling heat, were a trifle bemused by the rattle on the streets below, Crown Prince Abdul Ilah, Prime Minister Nuri el-Said, and other members of Iraq's monarchical regime were not. These two brigades had been ordered to move into the other Hashemite kingdom, Jordan, to strengthen the smaller and more vulnerable ally against the revolutionary menace of the newly created union of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic under the pan-Arabist leader ship of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. Iraq's crown prince and the prime minister, briefly awakened by the movement of armor, went back to sleep. There was no cause for concern.
In fact, the two brigades made an unscheduled stop and took over Baghdad, abolishing, the Hashemite monarchy and declaring the birth of the Iraqi Republic. The most powerful and arguably most stable pro-Western regime in the Arab Middle East had been toppled in a matter of a few hours and had been replaced by a virulently pan-Arabist group of young army officers.
That probably was the most momentous triumph of pan-Arabism. The new leaders of Iraq immediately announced their allegiance to the tenets of pan-Arabism and to the keeper of its conscience, Egypt's Nasser. And the expectation was that Iraq would soon join Egypt and Syria in an expanded United Arab Republic.
The pro-Western governments of Lebanon and Jordan, fearful that their independence would be swept away by this relentless revolutionary tide, asked for, and immediately received, Western military help. The day after Iraq's military coup, American Marines landed on the shores of Beirut, Lebanon's capital, to be followed two days later by British paratroopers in Amman, Jordan.
Pan-Arabism, the ideology that contemptuously dismissed state sovereignty in the Arab world as a shameful residue of colonial perfidy, preaching instead the organic unity of all Arabs into one powerful state as the only way to confront the West's political and cultural domination, seemed unstoppable in those heady summer days of July 1958.
The Roots Of Pan-Arabism
In the fifties and sixties, the great
...
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