With every major development in the Middle East- in the Arab Levant and its surroundings above all- questions are raised about communal groups and the extent of their integration into their nation-states, or the extent to which those nation-states can accommodate them through fair political systems that ensure they are represented and recognized.
With the American-Iranian war, we were reminded that Persians make up less than half of the Iranian population; observers, along with politicians and strategists, began discussing the conditions of the non-Persian nationalities: how far they are in harmony with the center or capable of breaking it. That, however, does not negate Iran's influence, which it has been spreading across an entire continent by exploiting the fragility of other countries' national fabrics.
More recently, with the Israeli elections and the high Arab turnout, which announced the Arabs' powerful presence, the Arab question in the Jewish state has emerged as one of the most important questions of the present moment; it may, before long, become the most important question of the future. Since the Israeli-Lebanese war, "disarmament" has become the leading axis of a split along sectarian lines, regardless of the intentions and wishes on either side of the conflict to deny that fact. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and before it the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, in turn became two events containing- among others- a sharp sectarian dimension. As for the Kurdish question in Türkiye, but also in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, hardly any major event in the region fails to shape it or be shaped by it.
Major developments- war and peace, the fall of regimes, watershed elections- have an exceptional capacity to expose what had been hidden, bring the latent into the open, and make and break external alliances, thereby falling into the category of a "fateful event." At the very least, they are a community's opportunity to either submit and adapt or change the rules of the game and the balance of power. The bigger the objection to the status quo, the greater the tremor and likewise the scale of the objectors' demand, the human and material costs that come with it, and the epic overtones its champions bestow on it.
This was not the case when communities' affiliations were not of a national or ethnic cast. But long strides have been taken down this road, for several reasons. Some have to do with the withering of the "grand narratives" that had overshadowed or disguised those loyalties; with the ideological vacuum that followed the end of the Cold War; and with the growing exposure of political regimes' factionalism- of the fact they were masked communal parties rather than instruments of arbitration standing above the fray. Add to this the complex link between globalization and the retreat of the nation-state itself, the explosion of smaller identities as safe havens for groups and individuals, and the mutation of economic and social conflicts into conflicts of identity.
As the ranks of those who fear the "cultural invasion" of globalization swelled, so did their attachment to their identities, which drew on the communications revolution to garner effective tools of organization and mobilization, constantly sharpening communal consciousness and fear among their groups. Finally, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman may well have been right that modern man lives in a "liquid" world that has no solid, settled institutions and relationships, with identity, whether religious or ethnic, thereby becoming a firm anchor in a shifting world.
One notices, here, that the common denominator of these backlashes is deep opposition to the nation-state in the form it has taken in our region since one or the other of the two world wars. If this brief piece does not allow for a discussion of the social and cultural premises that paved the way for and facilitated this unraveling, these remain causes and premises that cannot be reduced or traced back to any single factor. It may even be fair to say that we are still floundering in a "post-Ottoman" era that the nation-state, and our reception of it, failed to move beyond it or shape to what came after it.
We may, then, have reason to contemplate other formulas of political association- formulas that offer more robust guarantees of stability and bulwarks against violence, and that respond better to the wishes of communities resentful of the political structures they see as prisons that stifle them. Such formulas might draw on the form of the old imperial bonds, on condition that systems of broad autonomy underpin them; they might equally draw on federal systems, civilized divorces, and multinational states... History and the experiences of peoples are not stingy with the models they offer, provided a different mood takes shape in the world, and in the region above all.
A world that does not intervene, or that makes improvised and crooked interventions, does not provide the propitious, pressing climate without which this phase cannot begin. As for the region, where the new mood that would rescue us from withering and self-squandering imposes itself as an overriding necessity, it shows no clear sign that it is ready to embark on such a great adventure. The first step in this shift must be to arrive at an accurate, non-triumphalist description of our conditions, and to stop drowning endlessly in local details, missing the forest for the trees- the forest being the present form of political association. All the more so since such a mood, and the actions and initiatives it would entail, are not possible within the confines of a single state. Those who fear "others" they see as armed to the teeth with numbers, fanaticism, or both will neither take the initiative nor relinquish the tools they regard as the instruments and safeguards of their power. These are the "tools of the trade" of frenzied identities at the peak of their frenzy.
