Until the 1970s, a proclivity for one-size-fits-all solutions to the region's problems had shaped Arab political thought, particularly in the Levant. "Unity,liberation," and, occasionally, socialism initiated by a "national democratic regime," were presented as the pathway for realizing the aspirations of tens of millions, freeing them from the restraints of "artificial borders" or the discrepancies separating each state and society from the others.
Meanwhile, minority issues would arise or aggravate, whether ethnic, like the Kurdish question in Iraq, or religious, like the question of Arab Jews and Christians. Proponents of the unitary solution seemed content with either characterizing these "contingent" struggles as regrettable or attributing them to foreign meddling, promising that they would be resolved through this same unitary solution that would eradicate every discrepancy and flatten all differences.
Even civil wars, beginning with Yemen in the early 1960s and then Lebanon in the mid-1970s, were hyper-politicized to safeguard analytics purity and explained as struggles between "right" and "left" and "national liberation" movements resisting "colonialism."
Advocates of the unitary solution found a helping hand in disparate events and phenomena like the Algerian Revolution, the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, the union of Egypt and Syria, and finally, the Palestinian Revolution. Besides the diminishing occurrence of these events and phenomena, those who had relied on them to make their case consistently disregarded or trivialized the problematic elements inherent to each of these episodes. Neither Syria's secession from the "United Arab Republic" nor the Nasserist-Baathist infighting that shook the "national and progressive" camp, nor the fact that the Palestinian Revolution had itself been a defection from Nasserist Arab nationalism, was given the attention it deserved.
As to the first time the unitary solution theory was starkly exposed, rendering its failure to resolve anything blatantly undeniable, it was when Anwar Sadat made his move. With his "initiative" and then the Camp David Accords, it became clear that Egypt's priority (retrieving the territories it had lost in 1967) did not align with the priorities dictated by the unitary solution theory and that the 1973 war had been a fleeting joint effort that paved the way for sustained divergence.
Khomeini's Iran subsequently dealt its own blows to this theory, undermining it in two different respects: firstly, it premised the agenda, which had been founded on Arab nationalism and a progressive worldview, on Islamist grounds; secondly and more importantly, its sectarianization of the region was wholly antithetical to this theory. Sectarianism peaked with the war that Saddam's Iraq had initiated, and it then reached new heights with the war that Lebanese and Iraqi Khomeinist militias waged on the Syrian people.
With the Iran-Iraq War hardly behind it, however, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait split the Arab world in two and left the small country that had been attacked with no choice but to seek foreign assistance against the invasion of its "brother."
The fig leaves fell off en masse during this period. The "progressive nationalist regimes," those most invested in the unitary solution theory, were exposed. It became clear they had built despotic, corrupt, and inept dynastic republics and sought to take over their weaker neighbors.
The collapse of the Soviet Union - the patriarch that had been overseeing the implementation of this unitary solution and regional champions, engineering its fronts, arming its militaries and militias, training its spies, and then defending it in the Security Council- occurred within this context.
In turn, the Palestinian question, the "central cause" since the 1946 Inshas Arab Summit, became far less central. The Oslo progress stagnated after the nascent Palestinian Authority performed far below expectations. When it was torn apart by defections, notably the Hamas coup and its subsequent takeover of Gaza, a broad sense of boredom with this seemingly intractable struggle prevailed. Arab states were split between those that became laser-focused on their domestic affairs and those that had retreated in the face of exorbitant costs they could no longer bear. That was before the "cause" was seized by the "Resistance Axis," which made it into a central element of Arab civil wars and tied it to Iran’s expansionist regional project.
In parallel to all of that, an Iraqi question - one that was largely independent and self-contained - arose in 2003. Then came the Arab revolutions that, in their early phases, raised agendas specific to each country that are difficult to link to "the Arab concern that unites us," while what became known as "the Gulf model" rose and garnered appeal that does not intersect with the unitary solution theory at any point. And so, when the war sparked by the October 7 operation broke out, the expectations of the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese went in radically different directions.
The Welsh critic Raymond Williams viewed every cultural group as comprising three parts: dominant, emergent, and residual. It might be fair to place the unitary solution theory in the category of residual consciousness - the conscious or unconscious ways in which past cultural practices mark societies. "Residual" is not necessarily inconsequential or an abandoned past. It can be dynamic, potent, and consequential, especially when both the dominant and the emergent are weak. This largely applies to our relationship to the unitary solution theory: notions like "the Arab homeland" and "the central cause," and its resonance could well endure into the future as we continue to splinter further apart.
