Under the Al-Ahram headline, “Syrian history goes full circle,” the eminent international relations scholar, Gamal Abdel-Gawad, discusses the Syrian tendency to fragment into “political tribes”. As though the country’s ethno-sectarian divisions were not bad enough already, this phenomenon is hardly new. It has existed since at least the mid-1950s, when Syrian Army officers attempted to escape forward through a “unity” with Egypt instead of working to promote domestic cohesion to forge a true nation state. The United Arab Republic, as the Egyptian-Syrian union was called, collapsed within three years. Today, Syria is once again torn into multiple tribes of all stripes, after nearly a decade and a half suffering the repercussions of the so-called Arab Spring: fragmentation and collapse, foreign occupation by powers hostile to the regime in Damascus (Turkey and the US), and infestations of militias, whether the Turkish-backed Sunni jihadist militias hostile to the Alawite Baathist regime, the US-backed Kurdish militias, or the pro-regime Iranian militias or Iran-affiliated militias such as Hizbullah and the Popular Mobilisation Forces.

Syria is not alone in experiencing the recurring cycle of misery. We see it in other Arab countries whose national experiments failed to establish a cohesive state based on a common national identity, national culture, and geopolitical and economic interests. Yemen and Sudan are the foremost examples. Libya and Iraq are still on a knife’s edge, perhaps only held together by the oil wealth generating an interest that their sectarian and regional factions cannot afford to relinquish. Another case in point is Palestine, with Gaza severed from the West Bank after the Hamas coup, even before a state could be formed.

Arab intellectuals and thinkers still typically argue that all this disunity and fragmentation is the product of colonial era arrangements and territorial partitions, such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It is as though more than a century is not enough for that argument to have lost its efficacy. To some extent, the tendency to fall back on colonial machinations and the implantation of Israel in the region stems from the inclination to deny responsibility for the failure to build a nation state able to sustain the cohesion of the polity and flourish. For some time, the preferred alternative to that effort was to leap into the unknown by expanding the political realm to establish a single pan-Arab state or, for some, to resurrect the Islamic caliphate after the Turks renounced it.  

Perhaps people’s vision was too blurred to see a successful, sustainable, and undivided Arab national state with citizens who were not constantly at each other’s throats and without being overrun by jihadist groups or rapid support forces. Saudi Arabia, which was formed through a historical unification of the eastern and western portions of the peninsula, is currently experiencing a new phase of growth and prosperity. The United Arab Emirates unified seven emirates within a single federated entity, and each has since tried to outpace the others in the pursuit of progress. The other emirates in the Gulf were drawn towards a successful Arab effort to solidify bonds: the Gulf Cooperation Council. Cooperation took other forms as well, such as solidarity with Kuwait at the time of the Iraqi invasion—they would not brook unification by force of arms—and with Bahrain during the so-called Bahraini Spring in order to forestall Iranian intervention.

Egypt, as we know, has been a unified state since antiquity. For many decades it was united with Sudan under a single crown. That, fortunately, is in the past, for Egypt’s Sudanese brothers opted for a different route to independence, and that led to a series of civil wars that ended up separating Sudan into two states to the situation Sudan is facing today. At present, no one can tell how the current Civil War will end.

To the west, in North Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia managed to create a national identity strong enough to bind the Arab and Amazigh components of their societies. This unity was forged through the joint struggle against colonialism and then through innovative civil society work, whether under a monarchic or republican system, in the post-independence era.

The tragedy experienced by Syria and other Arab countries is, sadly, all too familiar. What we see unfolding today in our geographic proximity is heartrending, all the more so in the light of its historical precedents and the failure to remedy its underlying causes. However, the situation also demands a large degree of frankness, because Arab tragedies have a habit of spilling over into other Arab countries, creating vulnerabilities and strategic imbalances in favour of non-Arab regional powers ever ready to seize the opportunity to vent historical grievances or to remedy their own internal fragmentation through external adventures. Certain ideological movements, such as Arab nationalism or Islamism, will also leap at the openings to assert themselves, not to achieve unity, as they claim, but to aggravate the fragmentation.  

There is always a scapegoat on which to lay the blame, whether Western colonialism in the past or Zionist settler colonialism in the present, so as to avoid facing up to responsibility for the root cause that has left Arab countries open to such constant attrition. This root cause is the absence of a modern nation state due to the inability to develop a shared national identity and a bedrock of common economic and strategic interests.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly