Defining Arab Nationalism

Author(s):  
Adeed Dawisha

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Arab nationalism. Throughout his numerous writings on Arab nationalism, Sati‘ al-Husri—the foremost theoretician of Arab nationalism—never lost sight of the ultimate goal of the ideology he so vigorously propagated, namely the political unity of the Arabic-speaking people. He wrote that the happiest of nations were the ones in which political and national boundaries were fused into one another. In another one of his writings, Husri says that he is constantly asked how was it that the Arabs lost the 1948–1949 war over Palestine when they were seven states and Israel was only one? His answer is unequivocal: the Arabs lost the war precisely because they were seven states. Thus, to avoid losing future wars, the Arabs had to unite into one Arab state.

Malala ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 70-80
Author(s):  
Diogo Bercito

This article investigates the role of the mahjar on the development of Arab nationalism, with a particular interest in Antoun Saadeh’s experience in Latin America. Like many other Arab nationalism ideologues, he developed his conception of the “nation” during the years he spent abroad. His ideas were present in Suriya al Jadida, a newspaper he published in Brazil from 1939 to 1941. I analyze three articles from that publication in order to understand how he reached out to the diaspora in Latin America and the role he expected it to play. With that, I emphasize the importance of the mahjar to the political thought of Arabic-speaking countries.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Baron ◽  
Sara Pursley

The first two articles in this issue, reflecting growing scholarly interest in the global era of decolonization in the two decades after World War II, track multilayered local, regional, and global forces that shaped particular historical shifts during these pivotal years. Cyrus Schayegh, in “1958 Reconsidered: State Formation and the Cold War in the Early Postcolonial Arab Middle East,” revisits the political crises that tore rapidly through the central Arab states in 1958, focusing on Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which were “sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt.” While Schayegh concurs with previous scholarship that the convulsions of that year did not lead to the deep sociopolitical and ideological transformations in the region that many contemporaries either hoped or feared, he argues that they can now be read as marking a historical milestone of a different sort. In all three countries, the events of 1958 sparked immediate, dramatic, and persistent “state-formation surges,” particularly through the rapid implementation of development plans aimed at defusing both socioeconomic discontent and the political aspirations fueled by Nasirist Arab nationalism on one side and Arab communist movements on the other. Schayegh suggests that these state-formation surges in turn shaped similarities in the three countries’ subsequent historical development in spite of stark differences in their political systems of governance.


Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky

This introductory chapter discusses the unquestioned identification between “Zionism” as a national movement that sought to realize the Jewish nation's self-determination in Palestine, and “the Jewish nation-state,” which has no room for the national collective existence of any particular national group other than the Jews and which represents the ultimate and teleological realization of the Zionist project. The vast majority of those who support the two-state solution, who are known as the “Zionist left,” base their position on the need to avoid the formation of a binational state in which the Jewish demographic majority would be endangered. They argue that this is the way to rescue what they consider to be the political core of the Zionist idea: a mono-national state for the Jewish political collective.


Author(s):  
John B. Nann ◽  
Morris L. Cohen

This introductory chapter provides an overview of legal history research. An attorney might conduct legal history research if the law at question in a legal dispute is very old: the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are well over two hundred years old. Historical research also comes into play when the question at issue is what the law was at a certain time in the past. Ultimately, law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The chapter then describes the U.S. legal system and legal authority, and offers six points to consider in approaching a historical legal research project.


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Antic

This article analyzes how the ideological discourse of the Croatian fascist movement (the Ustaša) evolved in the course of World War II under pressures of the increasingly popular and powerful communist armed resistance. It explores and interprets the way the regime formulated its ideological responses to the political/ideological challenge of the leftist guerrilla and its propaganda in the period after the proclamation of the Ustaša Independent State of Croatia in 1941 until the end of the war. The author demonstrates that the regime, faced with its own political weakness and inability to maintain authority, shaped its rhetoric and ideological self-definition in a direct dialogue with the Marxist discourse of the communist propaganda, incorporating important Marxist concepts in its theory of state and society and redefining its concepts of national boundaries and racial identity to match the communists’ propaganda of inclusive, civic national Yugoslavism. This massive ideological renegotiation of the movement’s basic tenets and its consequent leftward shift reflected a change in an opposite direction from the one commonly encountered in narratives of other fascisms’ ideological evolution paths (most notably in Italy and Germany): as the movement became a regime, the Ustaša transformed from its initial conservatism, traditionalism (in both sociopolitical and cultural matters), pseudo-feudal worldview of peasant worship and antiurbanism, anti-Semitism, and rigid racialism in relation to nation and state into an ideology of increasingly inclusive, culture-based, and nonethnic nationalism and with an exceptionally strong leftist rhetoric of social welfare, class struggle, and the rights of the working class.


Belleten ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 66 (247) ◽  
pp. 931-942
Author(s):  
Yücel Güçlü

At 6 a.m. on 1 October 1918, Feisal's forces entered Damascus. All day and night they flowed into the Omayade capital and started looting and killing, particularly Turkish soldiers who were wounded and sick. British units remained outside the city. The new Arab administration proved unable to keep order. One particularly gruesome incident was the looting of the main Turkish hospital. It contained between 600 to 800 wounded. Many of them died. The Turks had no cover for the sick. Few of the men had blankets; they had no medical organisation. There were no drugs, bandages, or food fit for sick men; no sanitation. Very little assistance could be obtained from the local Arab authorities in Damascus. They were indifferent to human suffering. However, the wounded Turks left in Damascus suffered not just because of Arab logistical problems, but also because the political need to exclude the British units from Damascus left the sick and wounded Turks bereft of care. The British re-occupied the Turkish military hospitals after four days' Arab control as the Turkish wounded were receiving no care. They then set about cutting the death rate from 70 to 15 a day. The patterns of military administration in Damascus were supposed to follow international practice as prescribed in the Fourth Convention Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land signed at the Hague in the Netherlands on 18 October 1907 and entered into force on 26 January 1910, to which both Britain and the Ottoman Empire were parties. The British clearly disregarded the general rules on the occupied enemy territories as defined by this convention. It was essential to obey the main rules of military occupation. Therefore the neglect of the Turkish hospitals in Damascus by British forces, was, to say the least, unlawful. The poor conditions for the wounded Turks were a direct result of the British army being instructed to promote an Arab administration in Damascus. The French looked upon this British connivance with indignation. Paris accused London of hiding behind the façade of Arab nationalism to undermine French influence in Syria. During the war Britain had already in the Sykes-Picot Agreement recognised French interest in Syria. In terms of international politics it must have been that the Turkish sick and wounded were marginal to the central objective of giving the impression that Feisal's Arabs were in charge. Turks suffered as a result of British realpolitik.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.


Author(s):  
Adeed Dawisha

This chapter examines Arab nationalism after the Six Day War of June 1967, which was a seminal event in Arab contemporary history. What the Six Day War did was to irretrievably rob Arab nationalism of the crucial element of unification. While Arabs—in whatever state they lived—continued to recognize their membership in the cultural space called “the Arab world,” a recognition shared by rulers and subjects alike, they no longer truly believed in the viability of organic political unity. The Six Day War had also cost Egypt dearly in life and material. Moreover, beyond these horrendous losses, the war was responsible for many domestic and economic maladies.


2020 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Ismail K. White ◽  
Chryl N. Laird

This concluding chapter examines the broader implications of this research, both empirical and normative. It discusses the potential for this theoretical framework to further understanding of the political behavior of other social groupings in America. The chapter also considers the framework's applicability to understanding the political homogeneity of localized racial groupings. If the foundational mechanism of political power through unity is that identified by the framework—coracial social ties—then desegregation and the loss of black institutions are a fundamental challenge to the doing of black liberation politics. The chapter discusses what this might mean for the future of black politics. In so doing, it also engages arguments about the harms of coracial policing and weighs how to think about balancing those concerns against the reality that the political unity that has consistently enabled black political power relies on a process of social sanctioning. Finally, the chapter considers the questions future research might answer by engaging and applying this theoretical framework and charts a course for future progress.


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