In Search of Arab Unity: 1930-1945 (review)

246 SAIS REVIEW Policymakers should exercise patience and due respect, since "to a large extent , the people of North Africa will solve their own problems, and they will do it in their own way." Synthesizing the two halves of Parker's North Africa: Regional Tensions and Strategic Concerns, the reader cannot avoid being struck by the strength of the presentation of North African tensions and their origins and by the reserve of the discourse and advice addressing U.S. foreign policy initiatives. In Search of Arab Unity: 1930-1945. By Yehoshua Porath. London: Frank Cass, 1986. 376 pp. |32.50/cloth, $14.95/paper. Reviewed by Davidf. Pervin, M.A. candidate, SAIS. Pan-Arabism has been, or was, one of the most popular ideologies in the Arab world. The roots of its popularity lay in the historical image of Arab unity and strength of the early caliphates and in its promise that, with the reattainment of unity, so too would the strength return. During its heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s, pan-Arabism was a considerable force in Arab politics, buttressed by the union of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. Cracks in pan-Arabism appeared with the dissolution of the UAR in 1961; the 1967 defeat to the Israelis was a further setback. By the late 1970s it was confidently declared that pan-Arabism had met its end. Regardless of the attraction of pan-Arabism as an ideology, in practical politics it had little relevance, for reasons that are superbly elucidated in Yehoshua Porath's In Search of Arab Unity: 1930-1945. This irrelevance of pan-Arabism stemmed partly from the ideology's Utopian nature and from the diffuseness of its goals— unity, coordination, or merely cooperation among the Arab countries. More important, as Porath, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem, points out, its weakness lay in the fact that "rarely could pan-Arabism as a political force be separated from the state or dynastic interests of one protagonist or another." And as the British minister in Cairo wrote in 1944, "Divisions and jealousies as well as the instability of the Arab States" worked against unity. Each Arab state or dynasty had its own agenda and its own interpretation of the meaning of pan-Arabism, but none could afford to be seen as not adhering to its tenets. The Hashemites of Iraq and Transjordan sought to use panArabism to reinforce their claims to leadership in the Arab world and were opposed by the Syrian republican regime, which the Hashemites sought to topple, and by the monarchies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egypt's entry into interArab politics and its identification as an Arab country—by no means a predetermined fact—was preempted, according to Porath, by opposition to the Hashemites, by its desire for regional leadership, and by "the growing involvement of the masses in public life." These masses had little understanding of "Western concepts of political-territorial communities. . . . Their allegiance was mainly directed to Islam," their sympathies lying with the Muslim Arabs. But BOOK REVIEWS 247 it was the Palestine crisis, Porath argues, that "stands as perhaps the single most important factor which contributed to the growth of the pan-Arab ideology, to the feeling of solidarity among the Arab peoples and to the attempt at shaping a unified general Arab position and policy." Indeed, the Palestinian Arabs actively sought the support of the other Arabs. The British policy toward pan-Arabism in the interwar years was marked by ambivalence and ambiguity. This policy was motivated partly by concerns about how Arab unity would affect the British strategic interests in the Middle East. Perhaps more important, however, the diverse interests and perceptions of the various government departments dealing with the Middle East, and the infighting among them, made policymaking difficult if not impossible. Finally, British commitments to various allies and friends— including the French, who were resolutely opposed to pan-Arabism; the Zionists; and various Arab regimes— made any clear-cut decision fraught with danger. The British policy can thus be characterized as a delicate balancing act based on procrastination. In reading In Search ofArab Unity, it...