From Il Programma Comunista, no.10 1957

The latest news from Jordan heralds the opening of the “purge” phase after the crackdown carried out by conservative forces coalesced around King Hussein. Special courts have taken over with broad powers, including the power to issue death sentences; in the Abdali concentration camp some three hundred personalities from the pro-Nasserite and pan-Arabist camp await the judges’ sentences; the army, police and bureaucracy are being subjected to an extensive purge, said to be taking place under Hussein’s personal direction. Thus, while the VI Fleet keeps a watchful eye on the countries bordering the tiny Hashemite kingdom, and marines land, albeit in tourist guise, on Lebanese shores, the court party, backed by Bedouin hordes and Circassian mercenaries from the king’s bodyguard, gives free rein to long brooded impulses of revenge.

In the days of old colonialism, it was the imperialist occupier’s turn to personally lay the halter. In the present day imperialism is able to escape such a must by being able, without occupying the disputed territory, to land the rebels and consolidate the power of the local “bojas”. This is another confirmation of what we have been repeating about the process of substituting “thermonuclear colonialism” for Anglo-French “historical colonialism”, resoundingly beaten into the breach in front of the Suez Canal by Washington’s wide-ranging maneuver. However, looking back at the events in Jordan, one realizes that other factors were played in favor of Hussein and the Court party, in addition to US financial and military intervention. In fact, the Jordanian crisis, which at first seemed to be expected to increase the number of Middle Eastern republics, has summed up in itself all the contradictions that bedevil the so-called Arab world, foremost among them that in which pan-Arabism is struggling when faced with the choice of means to achieve “the unity of the Arab Nation from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic”, as Colonel Nasser himself likes to express.

As things stand in the Middle East, Arab unification remains an unattainable utopia as long as it is entrusted—as it is now—to the politics of states. The insoluble contradiction of pan-Arab demagoguery consists in advocating national unity of the Arabs of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, the various principalities of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, but in claiming to achieve it through inter-state understandings, while it is clear that an “Arab nation”, constituted as a unitary state, is conceivable only through the demolition of the existing state scaffolding and the founding of a new political structure of a modern type. Indeed, a fundamental characteristic of the bourgeois revolution is the overcoming of the state particularism proper to feudalism. Now, in the central and eastern parts of Asia—as in India and China—unlike in what Europeans know under the misnomer of the Middle East, the process of centralization of political power is at a very advanced stage; in the “Arab world”, on the other hand, in spite of ethnic and linguistic unity, centralization of political power is still far from being a reality. The new and deep inter-Arab rifts caused by Jordan’s about-face stand to prove it.

Arab unification, of which agitators obsequious to the Cairo government fill their mouths, if and insofar as it remains entrusted to constituted governments, would be achievable on one condition only, and that is that modern Genghis Khan or an Arab-bred Tamerlane capable of crushing with force of arms the particularistic resistances to pan-Arabism would arise. But this would presuppose the existence of an economic and therefore military potential that—as the Egyptian army’s stampede in the Sinai campaign proves—does not exist, nor can it objectively arise. Aware of its economic and military weakness, Nasser’s government has attempted in recent months to achieve a federation of Egypt with Syria and Jordan, to be implemented within the framework of the alliance that already unites these three states and in which Saudi Arabia also participates. It is known that this kind of Arab NATO had even gone so far as to unify the command of the armed forces of the member states. But the events in Jordan have sufficiently shown how Egypt and Syria, which remain the major centers of the pan-Arabist movement, can only rely on their own forces while the Saudi and Hashemite dynasties, holding to feudal preservation on the one hand and friendship with the US on the other, have joined the Cairo move for the sole purpose of either neutralizing the action of pro-Egyptian currents fueled by Palestinian refugees, as is the case with Jordan, or to get paid higher royalties by US oil companies, as is the case with Saudi Arabia.

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Until the defeat of the extreme forces of pan-Arabism in Jordan, Western imperialism could, in its maneuvers to divide the Arabs and neutralize the Cairo alliance, focus only on Iraq. However, today, not only has the adversarial military array named after the Baghdad Pact, coalescing Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and Britain, been strengthened by the entry of the United States after the Anglo-American conference in Bermuda last March; but its strengthening has been matched by the serious weakening of the Arab alliance as a result of the political conflict now erupting between the Cairo-Damascus axis and Jordan. By taking an open stance in favor of King Hussein, just as he was hunting down local pan-Arabists, King Saud of Arabia threw his allies in Egypt and Syria into isolation. On balance, the great contest that erupted in the winter of 1955 between the camp opposed to anti-Western pan-Arabism headed by Iraq (in line with the interests of imperialism) and the camp advocating Arab unification under the banner of nationalism and anti-colonialism, which accepted Egypt’s political direction, ended, at least for the time being, in a stinging defeat for the latter. Nasser’s government sees itself back to square one, that is, isolation. Worse still: it wields blunt propaganda weapons, since the accusations leveled against Western imperialism and Israel presuppose, in order to exert an effective hold, the existence of real inter-Arab cooperation; and this has proved to be only a phrase.

The meddling of the United States, along with other imperialist powers, in the Middle East plays precisely on the deep cleavages that divide the Arab “world”. The Arabs are divided: that truth escapes no one. But is the cause of these persistent and indeed acute political divisions merely identifiable in the “intrigues” of the diplomacy of the imperialist powers, as the pan-Arabist press, echoed by that of international national-communism, unanimously declares, or is the opposite true, that is, that imperialism has good play in pitting Arabs against Arabs precisely because the cleavages that tear them apart are inherent in the situation in the Middle East?

The organization of the “Arab Nation” into a unitary state stretching from Iraq to Morocco is certainly—in the bourgeois framework—a revolutionary aspiration. But industrial progress and the breakdown of pre-bourgeois social compacts into the classes that characterize bourgeois society (Arab unification could not go beyond that goal, absent the communist revolution of the proletariat in the countries of accomplished capitalism) are revolutionary facts when they move within the framework of old semi-feudal structures; while the ideology and politics of Nasserist pan-Arabism, whatever the Kremlin-affiliated parties may claim, far from being revolutionary fall within the ranks of conservative utopias. Like or not, Nasserist pan-Arabism dreams of procuring for the Arabs of Africa and Asia what the North American Confederation procured for the Americans, the Soviet Union for the Russians, the Indian Union for the Indians; but it does not understand, for class reasons, that at the origin of these state bodies acted great revolutions, which introduced, or are introducing, new modes of production and new forms of social organization. Now the angry pan-Arabists in Cairo and Damascus, who dream of a modern edition of the Caliphate, are revolutionaries as long as the targets of their hatred are located outside their respective borders; they are no longer revolutionaries as soon as they deal with matters at home.

The political unification of the Arab world is possible on the sole condition of marching together with a movement of economic and social unification, which can only be a revolutionary movement. Only a revolution that shakes up the archaic feudal, or even pre-feudal structures—how else to define the nomadic Bedouin tribes, saviors of Hussein’s faltering throne?—can mark the beginning of the erasure of divisions that render the “Arab nation” powerless. Think of the formidable force of inertia opposing societies such as those prevailing in Saudi Arabia or Yemen or in the Arab principalities of the Persian Gulf, “petrified” in very ancient social structures. Consider, on the other hand, the extraordinary social political evolution of a non-Arab state in the Middle East, the State of Israel, where a true form of “transplantation” of modern industrialism is taking place. But pan-Arabists à la Nasser claim to reap the fruits of the revolution, striving to destroy even its revolutionary seed. No one ignores the fact that the Napoleon of Egypt uses an iron fist and harsh imprisonment for anyone who attacks, or seems to attack, Egypt’s internal social stability.

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To conclude: two modes of unification of the Arab world are conceivable in theory: one, military conquest by a hegemonic state that erases the prevailing state partitions in the territories inhabited by people of the Arab language group and ethnicity; and two, a revolution of the lower classes that, by destroying the established order, lays the groundwork for the founding of a unitary state.

The first alternative is marred by the absence of a militarily-strong and politically-influential Arab state capable of performing the same functions that, under other historical conditions, Prussia and Piedmont performed for Germany and Italy, respectively. On the other hand, the existence of the great imperialist blocs headed by the United States and Russia easily suggests that any inter-Arab war would turn, through the direct or indirect, overt or covert, adherence of certain countries to one bloc and of certain others to the rival bloc, into a war involving non-Arab states. Since the US VI Fleet rushed into Lebanese waters, who would still doubt it?

Indeed, the question of Arab unification is inextricably linked to the worldwide struggle for oil sources and military bases. US imperialism cannot jeopardize the position of strength it enjoys, it is able to deal with the Arab states taken each in isolation, if not in competition with the others. The proclamation of the Eisenhower Doctrine did not occur by accident; its primary objective is the maintenance of the status quo in the Middle East. Declaring itself opposed to any measure likely to “threaten the independence and integrity” of the Arab states—under such principled cover, the State Department rushed the VI Fleet into the waters of the eastern Mediterranean—US imperialism, which inherited supremacy in the Middle East, aimed above all to bar the way for the pan-Arab movement. And, as long as there is the overwhelming military power of the United States to watch over the preservation of a political order characterized by the division of the Arabs into several sovereign states, each jealous of its independence and the economic privileges enjoyed for its dealings with foreign imperialism; as long as any attempt at political unification bumps, like the planned federation between Egypt, Jordan and Syria, against the indomitable resistance of US imperialism, the pan-Arabist movement will remain in the conditions of vain impotence that we observe today.

Missing so far, on the other hand, is the second perspective: that of a social revolution. The Nasserist movement, despite the heated demagoguery of its leaders, can in no way be called a mass revolutionary movement. It was not accompanied by any social upheaval, merely grafting into the same social structure on which the monarchy rested a political regime that differed from the one supplanted only (and even on this there would be many reservations to be made) in its foreign policy orientations, which in turn were made possible only by the urgency of new power relations among the world’s great powers. In other words, it was not a revolutionary push by the Egyptian masses that imposed the “new foreign policy” that Nasser followed beginning on the day he nationalized the Suez Canal. Colonel Nasser and his followers, echoed by the Russian-Communist press, pass off the expropriation of Canal shareholders as an aspect of their purported social revolution. In reality, this has not even touched the deep layers of Egyptian society, which continue to live in the iron meshes of backward productive relations, nor has it expressed the overbearing will for the rise of a bourgeoisie worthy of the name.

Only the social revolution, when the premises are ripe for it, will be able, by demolishing old structures, to suppress the mushrooming of states, large and small, that derive life from them. It is to such a path that the pan-Arabists in Cairo and Damascus are turning their backs by entrusting their political fortunes to state-to-state intrigues, but it is safe to predict that future historical conditions, brought about by the resumption of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat in capitalist countries, forcing imperialism on the defensive, will also enable the Arabs to free themselves from subjection to imperialism on the one hand and from the survivals of feudal particularism on the other.