Are the various crises in the Arab world- from Sudan to Iraq to Libya to Lebanon and others- linked to another? Some argue that they are not. However, if we choose to take a deeper look, we find that there is an undeniable underlying connection.
This connection has two parts: the first is the failure to understand the difference between the nation-state and the civic state, and the second is the failure to understand the difference between citizenship and identity. The overarching theme, then, is “failure to manage diversity.”
This failure is the cause of all the crises in our vast Arab lands.
Some in the region argue that Arab states are artificial constructs and that the solution is uniting the Arab or Islamic “Ummah.” Consequently, they have no problem in disregarding borders to pursue larger projects that they believe offer a way out of the impasse. Others see the nation itself as an identity, seeking to impose uniformity and mold a single identity for all citizens. This is also impossible: nowhere in the world (except in extremely isolated societies) do nations or societies have a single unified identity. All states and societies contain multiple identities.
Lee Smith, an American writer who published a book fifteen years ago (that has not been translated into Arabic) entitled “The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations”, offers powerful insights into this matter. In his book, he seeks to explain the dynamics of Middle Eastern conflicts from within Arab cultural experience, rather than approaching these questions with the usual Western projections.
His work drew on the years he had spent in the region (living in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo) closely observing its political and intellectual shifts. If we add to that another important book, which has been translated into Arabic, Alex Rowell’s “We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World,” which covers the Nasserist experiment and its negative repercussions on the Arab world, a clearer picture emerges.
In essence, both books (despite their differences) reveal the immense suffering engendered by the “swamp of ideology’s” influence on state-building: the pursuit of a unified identity, or the pull of transnationalism, and how these projects brutalized the Arab individual.
The truth is that this region never truly had a modern state in the institutional sense. Authority stems from personal, kinship, or sectarian ties. That is why we see military coups constantly recur under various ideological slogans. At the same time, laws are marginalized, and public policy is not shaped by the notion of citizenship.
The absence of equal citizenship within a comprehensive legal framework has pushed non-state actors to rely either on a foreign patron or on a fabricated sense of victimhood.
We have seen this happen in the twenty-first century. The fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, followed by Gaddafi’s, then al-Bashir’s, and before them Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, were all the result of crude attempts to melt citizenship into an imagined identity and to bypass the national state.
For this reason, we should not be surprised by today’s bloody conflict in Sudan along ethnic, racial, and interest-based lines. Nor is it surprising to see Iraq’s political struggle shaped by these same ethnic and sectarian lines, under the cover of armed militias that prioritize what is beneath the state over the state itself. It should not be surprising that a segment of the Lebanese population clings to either- arms that threaten the very existence of the Lebanese state. And if we turn to the Maghreb, we find the unjustifiable conflict over Western Sahara (a conflict between brothers) that has largely paralyzed development in those regions.
When the central state collapses, as in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, minorities or sub-state groups dominate, relying on foreign support to marginalize others, who fall victim to sectarian and political chaos.
All of this reflects the absence of a dignified social contract for all citizens that guarantees equality in rights and duties; that is, the denial of public freedoms and of equality among citizens.
Reform cannot come through superficial elections. It requires domestic cultural change that begins within education: a shift toward respecting law and institutions rather than individuals, placing citizenship above religious and tribal identity, and recognizing the various components of society as essential and indigenous components.
Some of us rushed to embrace elections and democracy, ignoring the cultural and social system built on allegiance and power. Constructed enemies are often used to justify domestic failures and to rally society together around hostility to a foreign enemy. Instead of confronting the crisis of citizenship inside Arab societies themselves, these political frames fuel crises that have sparked civil wars, as in Yemen, Sudan, and others.
Most forces that present themselves today as alternatives take the same approach: submission to a totalitarian ideology rather than redefining power: replace the power of domination with the power of institutions, law, and knowledge, for the sake of coexistence within healthy, harmonious societies.
To conclude: the crisis is born of reducing the state to an individual rather than institutions.
