Pan-Arabism produced several unions, and none of them lasted
Pan-Arabism dreamed of one Arab nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea. It peaked in the 1950s and 1960s and yielded real mergers, including the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria. Every one collapsed. A rival Hashemite federation of Jordan and Iraq survived only six months, and Libya's later schemes fared little better.
The idea took shape in the late nineteenth century among Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, during the cultural revival known as the Nahda. The writer Jurji Zaydan, who lived from 1861 to 1914, helped lay its intellectual groundwork and championed a modernised form of Quranic Arabic, today's Modern Standard Arabic, as the shared written language rather than local dialects. Arab nationalism supplied the core claim that Arabs form a single nation.
Politics followed in the First World War. Sharif Hussein of Mecca sought an independent unified state in the Mashreq, and letters exchanged with Britain in 1915 and 1916 promised backing if the Arabs rose against the Ottomans. But the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 quietly divided parts of the region between Britain and France. In the 1930s a group of Syrian intellectuals, among them Michel Aflaq, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Constantin Zureiq, built a firmer ideology, and Aflaq and Arsuzi founded the Ba'ath Party. Jordan's Abdullah I hoped to rule a Greater Syria, but suspicion of his ambitions helped prompt the founding of the Arab League in 1945.
Egypt, the most populous Arab country, was a late convert. In the 1930s and 1940s its activists spoke the language of Egyptian nationalism, not Arab unity. That changed under Gamal Abdel Nasser, who made Arab nationalism and Arab socialism state policy. With Syria's Shukri al-Quwatli he created the United Arab Republic in 1958, meant to be pan-Arabism's spearhead. A looser United Arab States with Yemen dissolved in 1961. Muammar Gaddafi later pushed a Federation of Arab Republics, which lasted five years, and a union with Tunisia that never materialised; the Arab Maghreb Union formed in 1989 instead.
Historians point to several reasons for the decline. Pan-Islamism offered a competing vision of unity based on religion rather than ethnicity, and some religious scholars saw the two as contradictory. Sunni and Shia divisions and differences between more secular and more conservative societies strained cohesion. Leaders competed to be the voice of the Arab world. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, together with weak economic growth in Egypt and Syria, badly damaged the movement's credibility.
Source: Pan-Arabism
