When the Ottoman Sultanate collapsed at the end of the First World War, the Arab Levant had two options: either accept the nation states that the British and French mandates come to us with, or try to build a state that encompasses all the communities and peoples of the region, such that the link, this time around, is Arab instead of Ottoman.
Indeed, Prince Faisal bin Hussein rose to power in Damascus, relying on the explicit and open support of the British. However, its misery and failure, as well as a poor understanding of the global post-World War One new order, killed this episode, and the French army then took up the task of bringing it to a close in Maysalun.
During this critical juncture in the history of the region, Levantine elites were divided between those who opposed the European mandates without developing an alternative vision for their countries, and those who accepted the new state of affairs and cooperated with the mandate authorities. However, with minor exceptions, those who gave their consent pasted the old rhetoric onto this new reality - they borrowed the term “Arab homeland” from the lexicon of the Hashemite experience and, from the late nineteenth-century unifications of Germany and Italy (as well as their Ottoman students), the terms “nationalism” and “nation” to describe the Arab whole that they sought.
These new countries were thus deprived, even among those who accepted them, of the culture that was supposed to accompany their emergence. On the day the foreign forces withdrew from Syria on April 17, 1947, Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli famously proclaimed that the flag of Arab unity was the only flag he would raise above his country’s. Although Lebanese Prime Minister Riad al-Solh had made a herculean push to shift advocay for “Syrian unity” into a focus on Lebanon and Lebanonism. The sixties and seventies saw the emergence of an untenable project of reconciling the Lebanese state and the Palestinian revolution that had been raging at the time.
In all of this, failure blended with the weight of nostalgia and the force of habit, never left the side of Levantine political thought. We know that this cocktail of notions and concepts was among the most active trains taking the military to government. In the 1960s, this was pushed to its peak by the “unionist” Baath Party in Syria and Iraq.
This period is now in the past, but what has not passed is our region's dissension into the lowest pit of hell and its remaining there.
Today, we are failing to deal with our current condition, state fragmentation, any better than we had dealt with the emergence of states a century ago. The conflicts or wars of varying intensity we are seeing across the Levant, as well as countries outside the Levant like Yemen, Libya, and Sudan, have not been met with any useful proposal or any idea on how to end the violence, contain the hatred, and pave a reasonable path to the future. Once again, we see international mediation efforts by powers interested in the region for one reason or another, complaints that others are drawing maps for us, and foreign powers occupying segments of some of those countries, while we continue to behave like guests or tourist residents in homelands that belong to others.
The fact is that one reason for this negative behavior is our peoples having been outside politics and reflection on public affairs for decades, whereby nothing remains of our ability to intervene in our state of affairs besides cursing the “conspiracy” staring us down with unblinking eyes. However, another reason is a popular political culture which is not all that far from conspiratorial thinking. Its narrative is that there are people “transforming” our conflicts into sectarian and ethnic conflicts, thereby corrupting these conflicts’ supposedly liberating essence. As for the fact that this “transformation” succeeds time and again, in one country after another, nothing stands in the way of those who are committed to denying reality. This denial takes many forms, as the political system, partisan doctrines, transnational political causes, and, recently, championing religion, are always emphasized in ways that the cohesion of the state and society are not; or this cohesion has often been viewed as a mechanical outcome of the systems, doctrines, causes, and religions.
Today, we have political and social factors that are difficult to ignore in explaining how we arrived at this horrifying lack of self-awareness, including the coherence of Iran's strategic project and its resolve against the weak immunity or lack of foresight facing us, though its intentions for these countries' interior and border regions have become apparent to the blind. We also have the fragmentation and scattering because of the waves of refuge and coerced immigration doing away with nations' maps and undermining the already frail cohesion of their populations.
On the ideas front, we are always confronted by those who put everything down to a single factor, which could be a particular regime or culture, in isolation of how deeply rooted this regime and culture are and without noting their intersectionality, which has succeeded in subverting the peoples themselves, and this has become the bottom line. Peoples can also become sick, contrary to the claims of populists who see greatness in them for any number of reasons. The peoples of our countries are indeed very sick today. And one of the symptoms of this illness is their inability or unwillingness to produce a single useful idea or proposal. This is the case despite the fact that what should be contemplated is nothing less than the lives and deaths of those peoples.
