The ideology of nationalism emerged in Europe in the early 19th Century. Its general, or international, principle can be stated as follows: Every definable ethnocultural nation should have its own state, with a single government uniting all persons and territory of that nation, and independent of any foreign power.
Naturally, any attempt to apply this principle can lead to conflict as soon as one has to decide whether a given set of people are inside or outside the “ethnocultural nation” (usually defined by language more than anything else) in question, or whenever a given patch of land is claimed as the historic territory of more than one nation. Nevertheless, nationalism was a kind of advance over the older conception of territories ruled by princely dynasties by hereditary right.
In the late 19th Century, a form of Arab nationalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_nationalism) emerged called pan-Arabism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Arabism) – the idea that all the Arab peoples from Morocco to Iraq and from Syria to Yemen should be united in a single state defined by the Arabic language and Arab culture (not by the Islamic faith). The idea was important in WWI, in fomenting Arab resistance to Ottoman rule. But since then, the idea has not had much success. As soon as Ottoman power over the Arabs was ended in 1918, the British and French started colonizing the Arabs in their own way; and since there was more than one European sphere of influence in the Middle East, unification was problematic. In the event, post-Ottoman Arabia ended up divided among several states, most of them monarchies or dictatorships, and most of them British or French clients. Then after WWII, when French and British power declined, the borders and states they had created endured. There was a United Arab Republic incorporating Egypt and Syria, but nobody else wanted to join and it only lasted from 1958 to 1961. The Ba’athist movement was dedicated to Pan-Arabism, among other things, but it never caught on outside of Iraq and Syria, and in Iraq it’s been overthrown. The current situation in Iraq has served only to highlight the disunity between Arabs of different religious persuasions. There is the Arab League (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_league), which includes all the Arab countries, but it’s a mere association and talking-forum like the UN; it is not even a quasi-government like the EU, and does not appear likely to evolve into one.
Is there any future for the pan-Arabist idea? Or are Arabs destined to live in separate “nation”-states for the foreseeable future?
You might note that I have not even mentioned Israel or Zionism in the above discussion. That’s because I don’t regard it as an important hindrance to Arab unity (any more; it was a hindrance after WWI, when the British had made conflicting promises about Palestine’s future to the Jews and Arabs, and chose to sell out the Arabs). A united Arabia could, in theory, exist that left out both Israel and the Occupied Territories. But the main obstacles, it seems to me, are (1) the power of the established regimes in the various Arab states and (2) the failure of pan-Arabism to catch on, or to survive, as a motivating idea on the “Arab street.”
Apropos of nothing, here’s a passage on nationalism from Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1922 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper2/CDFinal/Lippman/ch10.html: