Borrowing the opening lines of Marx and Engels' famous “Communist Manifesto,” we could say that the specter of rethinking the state is haunting the Arab region.
The number of states whose unity is being contested continues to rise. The regional context within which each of these movements is distinct; the pace of these movements, their manifestations, and sometimes their ideologies, also vary. Nonetheless, the final destination is always one and the same.
Ravaged by the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, Sudan is now ripe for partition, keeping in mind that the country's south seceded from the north following a referendum in the summer of 2011.
When the Southern Transitional Council attacked Hadhramaut and Al-Mahra in Yemen, many recalled the Houthis’ 2014 coup and how they took control of Sanaa and much of the north. Others recalled when the South of the country went to war with the North, and that just four years after it had been reunified in 1990. By then the animosities gave rise to what became known as the "Southern Question."
More recently, Israel's recognition of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, established in 1991 following a ten-year war, brought the bloody history of this impoverished and tormented nation back to the forefront.
Amid the stagnation of the political process in Libya, there has been a consolidation of the country’s division between the east of the country, with its capital in Benghazi, and the west, with its capital in Tripoli, almost rendering the split fait accompli - mind you, the civil war that erupted in 2014 went on for six years.
From Paris, the "Government of Kabyle in Exile" announced the independence of the "Federal Republic of Kabyle" from the Algerian Republic. This declaration has precedents and historical context: a mass movement known as the "Berber Spring" swept through Tizi Ouzou in 1980 before being violently repressed. Indeed, just a year after Algeria's independence in 1962, Hocine Ait Ahmed, one of the most prominent leaders of the revolution, announced a Berber uprising.
In the Levant, however, fragmentation appears even more pronounced, profound, and pervasive. Iraq adopted a federal system that allowed for the establishment of the Kurdistan Region in the north. Marred by disputes and rivalries, however, its federal system largely remains a project in progress and in need of adjustments and completion. Meanwhile, the demand for a Sunni region in Anbar and its periphery only subsides for demands for Basra’s autonomy to intensify in the south.
Syria is in a precarious position. The recent protests in the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartus, which witnessed violence, have exacerbated the tensions that have been rising across the country since the events in the coastal region and Sweida. This comes amid growing concern about the trajectory of the relationship between the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as well as its worrying potential implications for the region.
Despite the evident challenges posed by Israel, Hamas in Palestine carried out a coup that has split the Gaza Strip from the West Bank since 2007, taking many lives and leading to a total political rupture between the two Palestinian territories.
As for Lebanon, it is no secret that the widening divergences between sectarian communities’ views have become devastating for this small country and its ability to recover and develop. Moreover, Lebanon's recent history and its long civil wars do not allow for much optimism about the future.
This record of conflict and bloodshed is the result of a mix of factors: from disparities in both the colonial and the post-independence eras, to regimes that failed to cultivate unifying national identities, cohesive political communities, and equal citizens, to a political culture that prioritizes sectarian, religious, ethnic, and regional affiliations over the state and the nation, to the end of the Cold War, which had limited the fragmentation of maps drawn in previous decades. Regardless of the cause, their death is one and the same: these countries have all failed to live with a centralized nation-state.
Even during the periods of relative peace that preceded the explosion of these smaller identities, or of peace amid their suppression, many of these countries’ political culture romanticized an imaginary broader nation and were ashamed of their existing state and nation.
Conversely, and this is evident in most of these countries, communities’ enthusiasm for the current political framework is correlated with being the numerical or political majority. When this changes, enthusiasm turns to apathy, and perhaps even hostility.
According to the above, maintaining the centralized nation-state model in these cases seems like a recipe for spilling blood in vain, squandering resources, and obstructing paths to the future. Our inspiration by the nation-state should be nuanced with an enhanced version of the city-state that removes distinctions between contemporary "citizens" and "slaves."
The current model, in these countries, has become like a corpse whose organs are dying; it is losing all of its capabilities beyond its capacity to devour other living beings and turn them, too, into corpses. Strict adherence in these contexts seems to go against both reason and morality. However, the worst element of this adherence, given our current circumstances, is the way in which it stifles any discussion of potential alternatives and unleashes the dead’s astonishing power to suffocate the living.
