What Is a Nation?

Approaching the question of definition concerns sorting out the elements that one understands as necessary and sufficient for constituting “a nation.” While some scholars stress the importance of “subjective” components—such as memories, values, consciousness, solidarity, myths, symbols, or will—others emphasize “objective” components such as territory, language, economic resources, bureaucracy, communication facilities, institutions, or the state. Examination of three arbitrarily chosen definitions helps to identify some of the problems that such efforts entail.⁵

For Benedict Anderson, a nation is “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”⁶ For Yael Tamir, a nation “exhibits both a sufficient number of shared, objective characteristics—such as language, history or territory—and self-awareness of its distinctiveness.” More recently, Tamir defined the nation as “a community whose members share feelings of fraternity, substantial distinctiveness and exclusivity as well as belief in a common ancestry and a continuous genealogy.”⁷ Finally, for Anthony Giddens a nation is “a collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored both by the internal state apparatus and those of other states.”⁸ The central problem arising from this sample of definitions is the difficulty in determining what is not a nation—that is differentiating “nations” from other collectivities. Tamir's dual definition could be applied to all ethnic groups and most religious or kin groups as well as she applies it to nations. In Giddens's definition, the differences between “a nation” and the sum of individuals living within an internationally recognized territorial state are negligible. Finally, the new European Union or the former Soviet Union fit Anderson's definition of the nation, as both are imagined political communities that are inherently limited and sovereign. But in light of the broader argument Anderson superbly unfolds, it is doubtful whether he would have wished this.

In a conceptual article better than many that followed it, Walker Connor identified the problem of a confusing interutilization of key terms such as “nation,” “state” and “ethnic group” in the study of nationalism.⁹

Yet his solution seems as awkward as that of the scholars he criticized. The claim, first, that a nation is “a self-defined rather than other-defined grouping” is a statement that is better understood in relation to the presence (or absence) of groups' relative power vis-à-vis other groups than one that can differentiate between types of groups. The (ostensibly) other-defined ethnic groups in the world (and the Middle East) do not appear “sufficiently self-defined” not because they do not define themselves as robustly as nations (presumably) do, or because they lack the will to define themselves on a national basis. Instead, ethnic groups appear other-defined solely because their numerical, economic, or political power vis-à-vis groups around them precludes from the outset their (otherwise desired) option to become self-defined nations. Put differently, the distinction between a self-defined and other-defined grouping simply seems epiphenomenal with respect to the question of power.

A second definition offered by Connor—that “a nation is a self aware ethnic group”—is important because it is embedded in many notions of nationhood, most notably in what Anthony Smith termed the conception of “perennialism” and Brendan O'Leary called “naturality theory.”¹⁰

A unilinear conception of the nation as being the “conscious stage” following ethnicity echoes modernization theory. While this definition has implicitly informed many studies, important empirical research testifies to its weaknesses. For example, the Druze community in Israel/Palestine is as deeply self-aware or conscious of itself as the neighboring Druze communities in Lebanon and Syria. Likewise, conversion—that is, entry to or exit from these communities—is religiously forbidden and socioculturally difficult (unless one physically moves away from the community). Despite these similarities in self-awareness, the highly politicized Lebanese Druze, according to the definition “a nation is a self-aware ethnic group,” would have to be considered a nation while the less politicized Syrian or Palestinian/Israeli Druze would have to be considered an ethnicity. Since the Druze question is too great to deal with here, I will just note that these characterizations are unconvincing.¹¹

Notwithstanding this host of truly challenging definitional barriers, it was (and is) erroneous to conclude, as is implicitly done in the majority of studies on nationalism in the Middle East, that the question, “What is a nation?” can be brushed aside without the inescapable cost of ghettoizing the field. Furthermore, it makes little sense to study a subject without a commitment to a definition of the chief concept around which it revolves (particularly if one aspires to contribute beyond one's area study). Hence, scholars of Middle Eastern nationalism should immerse themselves in the definitional debate while using the area's immense empirical findings. Until then, scholars of, say, Jewish and Arab nationalism can perhaps adhere to workable definitions of the nation such as “a group of people unified by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.”¹²

What is Nationalism and How Can We Understand It?

The second core question underlying the comparative social-science scholarship—how to define or understand nationalism—is more straightforward than the first, yet it is still difficult. To explain this, it is worth discussing Ernest Gellner's definition because it is embedded in many newer studies. For Gellner, nationalism “is primarily a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” Nationalism thus “can be best defined in terms of this principle.”¹³

Eric Hobsbawm follows this definition, and John Breuilly works with a similar one.¹⁴

What the unit is that should be politically and nationally congruent remains unclear. This ambiguity gives rise to a problem resulting from the fact that the phenomenon of nationalism has taken many types and forms. These include political, cultural, class-based, liberal, conservative, fascist, communist, territorial, pan-, linguistic, religious, “civic,” primordial, separatist, integrationist, racial, diasporic, colonialist, and more. The differences among these forms of nationalism—and thus the units they promote—are so profound that they might actually be more important than the similarities. The solution that social scientists have devised to the phenomenon's “multiplicity problem” has at times taken the form of typologies and at times the form of classifications.¹⁵

Yet the solution has mostly taken the form of dichotomies. It has been suggested that there are “Western” (voluntaristic) and “Eastern” (organic) nationalisms,¹⁶ or “nation-to-state” and “state-to-nation” routes of nationalism,¹⁷ or “old-continuous” and “new” nations or nationalisms,¹⁸ or “territorial/civic” and “ethnic/genealogical” nationalisms,¹⁹ or “civic” and “primordial” national ties,²⁰ or “historic” and “non-historic” nations and nationalisms²¹—to mention a few of these dichotomies. Like the majority of theoretically informed social-science studies on nationalism, these, too, have focused on comparing whole instances of the phenomenon while paying little attention to the dynamics that take place within each instance, as well as to the dynamics that take place across—as distinct from within or between—national movements that develop simultaneously in a mutually antagonistic manner (see Part III). The problem is that some of the most critical issues in the study of non-European nationalism cannot easily be accommodated within this comparative research agenda. If pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism, and particular Arab or African nationalisms (such as Egyptian or Ghanaian), cannot be differentiated using Gellner's “principle of nationalism,” but instead fulfill it equally and simultaneously, then one may well be conceptually correct yet faced with a dilemma: it appears that the organized sociopolitical bodies that were perhaps most committed to the national project or principle as defined by Gellner were those that were non-nationalist, such as communist, religious, or pan-type movements. Furthermore, a study of the histories of such groups vis-à-vis the dominant nationalist group in many Asian and African countries reveals that the dominant nationalist group frequently arrested or assassinated members of the other groups, who were, after all, fellow nationals. On the one hand, Gellner's principle of nationalism allows many mutually antagonistic units to be “politically and nationally congruent” simultaneously; on the other hand, Gellner hardly addresses the issue.

Breuilly also detours around the political diversity within national movements and the often violent struggles among rival constituents within every nation worldwide. In contrast to nearly all contemporary comparativists, Breuilly does incorporate the Middle East in his study. But in his sixfold classification, pan-Arab nationalism is placed under the rubric of “unification-nationalism which opposes the nation-state”—the nation-state being Egypt or Iraq. At the same time, Egyptian or Iraqi nationalisms are considered anticolonial and thus must be placed in the category “separation-nationalism which opposes the nation-state”—this time, the nation-state being Britain.²²

But pan-Arab (Egyptian or Iraqi) nationalists, or pan-African (Ghanaian) nationalists, were as anticolonial as Egyptian, Iraqi, or Ghanaian nationalists. In addition, pan-Arab nationalists always were more anti-British than they were anti-Egyptian or anti-Iraqi. Breuilly does note that pan-Arab and pan-African nationalism “existed prior to the establishments of independent African and Arab states” and that he himself is “concerned with their significance later on.”²³ I circumvent the question of whether such tailored periodization is permissible, given the broad comparative scope of Breuilly's study and given that the gradual emergence of pan nationalisms outside Europe is critical for such an inquiry. I would still suggest that the solution offered in his classification is too engineered because it disregards the issue of conflicting political aims within the presumably homogeneous nation. A more complete consideration of the phenomenon of nationalism—or the “formation” part in the maxim “national formation”—begs greater attention by theoretically minded comparativists to the diversity within every instance of nationalism.

For these reasons, a useful point of departure for both Middle East specialists and comparativists can be the following definition of nationalism: “the collective undertaking (by peaceful, forceful or violent means) of a group of individuals aiming to unify around a common social, economic, or cultural denominator for the purpose of securing, at a minimum, political self-rule.” What are the merits in this definition? To begin with, it is as conceptually inclusive as Gellner's definition. Yet it enables one to devote greater theoretical and comparative attention to the fact that within the nation there are subnational groups that, although fervently opposed to each other, must nonetheless all be considered nationalists. Since I believe that this subject is crucial to the possibility of linking comparative and Middle Eastern studies of nationalism, I want to exemplify its\break importance while drawing on a well-developed branch of scholarship within studies of nationalism in the Middle East—that is, studies of Egyptian nationalism before the 1952 revolution from above by the Free Officers.²⁴

First, Egypt's Marxist and Islamic groups were weaker than the leading secular nationalist group, the Wafd. Since they all meet the definition of nationalism proposed earlier, they must all be considered nationalists. This is notwithstanding the fact that the type of Egyptian self-rule that they worked for—against the colonial power and each other—differed profoundly. Whereas Egyptian Marxists struggled to institutionalize Egyptian society (nation) along class-based lines, the Islamists worked to consolidate the same collectivity along religious lines. As has happened in many colonized and postcolonial countries, these fellow members of the nation—Marxist, religious, and “regular” nationalist—often clashed violently. Second, to achieve the aim of a society cemented on class or religious lines, as sought by Egypt's Marxists and Islamists, respectively, the Egyptian working class or the Muslims of Egypt had to secure their political self-rule and, in so doing, exercise a profoundly different type of sociopolitical exclusion with which to demarcate the Egyptian collectivity. Inspected through the proposed definition, the political self-rule of “the workers of Egypt,” or that of “the Muslims of Egypt,” was a necessary prerequisite for any broader aim (such as the realization of pan-Islamic economic independence or of a classless society). Finally, Egyptian Marxists were more closely linked to regional and international Marxist groups and had more in common with them than they had with various “co-national” Egyptians. Similarly, members of the Society of Muslim Brothers had more in common with politicized Arab and non-Arab Muslims worldwide than they had with co-national Egyptians, whether communist or secular-nationalist.

In contrast to the specialized regional scholarship on nationalism in the Middle East, recent comparative social-science scholarship has devoted insignificant attention to the intense dynamics between subnationalisms within national movements globally. This theoretically conscious scholarship has tended to compare whole instances of national movements. When comparativists did address intranational dynamics, their research was mostly done before the end of the Cold War and was commonly restricted to a single case or country study rather than a comparison of such dynamics in two (or more) countries.²⁵

Yet this was exceptional; comparative social scientists tended to shy away from cross-regional investigation of subnational dynamics. In the 1990s they preferred to work on the more “luxurious” realm on which comparisons of whole instances of national movements (or states) were advanced.²⁶ This relative neglect of subnationalism could hardly change the fact that different organized groups within potential or realized nations or states—perhaps especially outside Europe—have distinct conceptions of what their nation is or should be; how and on what basis it should be defined; who it should include (or exclude); and what its designated borders should be. Various methods can be devised to explore these conflicting tendencies theoretically and comparatively within nations. What is now at stake is that the necessity of such an exploration does not seem to require further justification.

While the specialized scholarship on nationalism in the Middle East has rarely posed the defining question “What is nationalism?” in as theoretically structured a manner as the comparative social-science scholarship does, numerous studies on Middle Eastern nationalism certainly targeted creatively the issue of conflicting forces within movements, commonly in single case or country studies. In fact, intranational dynamics seem to be the main issue researched in the regional scholarship, usually in a historical-narrative form with little attention paid to the potential for broader theoretical or comparative implications.²⁷

Hence, the cross-regional comparative study of subnational dynamics currently holds the greatest potential for narrowing existing gaps between comparativists studying the phenomenon of nationalism globally and regionalists studying Middle Eastern nationalism. The definition of nationalism proposed earlier might help to propel the issue of competing subnationalisms within movements or states closer to the core agenda of the theoretical and comparative research and, in so doing, perhaps improve prospects for a tighter linkage between comparativists and regionalists studying the Middle East. To this end, greater theoretical attention needs to be paid by both scholarly communities to sociopolitical interactions of subnational groups within movements across regions.

How Does a Nation Come into Existence?

Of the core questions underlying the comparative study of nationalism, the third—How does a nation emerge?—is the most intriguing. Structured efforts to address the question are twofold. First, they attempt to identify the most decisive realm on which national formation should be understood. The four most prevalent realms are those of consciousness and sentiments; societal transformation; politics and power relations; and ideas and ideology. (As described later, the ideational realm has prevailed in many studies of Middle Eastern nationalism). The second element in theoretically conscious analyses of the question of national emergence consists of a construction (or selection) of an approach to the study of nationalism. Comparativists have employed competing approaches that can be classified in different ways. The most general distinction is between the “primordial” and “constructivist” approaches. Alexander Motyl has greatly advanced this distinction by subdividing both approaches into “extreme,” “strong,” and “weak.”²⁸

Breuilly has distinguished among the nationalist, communications, Marxist, psychological, and functional approaches.²⁹ In a recent work he grouped various studies under the categories of “primordial,” “functional,” “narrative,” and “modern” approaches to nationalism.³⁰ Rather than form yet more classifications, I prefer to assess some outstanding studies of nationalism that, even if they are not the newest, have an unmistakable impact on contemporary scholarship. These studies ultimately represent four ways in which the phenomenon can be addressed. I will pay attention to their implicit or explicit explanation of nationalism outside Europe.

A New Narrative?

Surveying and characterizing the scholarship on Arab nationalism written between the 1950s and the 1990s, Israel Gershoni has distinguished between an old narrative (which includes the four books just discussed) and a new narrative, which he says evolved in the early 1970s. “By treating previously unresearched topics, citing new evidence and employing innovative methodologies,” he argues, the scholars who gave rise to the new narrative enabled “a thorough rethinking of the history of Arab nationalism [from 1920 to 1945].”⁵⁸

From the disciplinary vantage point of comparative politics, the claim proposed in the remainder of Part II is this: while Gershoni has flawlessly identified the problems in the approach taken by the historians of ideas who indeed dominated what he terms the pre-1970 “old narrative,” he may have overrated the change brought about by what he terms the “new narrative.” More important, even if one disagrees and argues that Gershoni has not overstated this change, he may have still erred in identifying and characterizing this change conceptually. To explain this, I ask and answer three questions vis-à-vis Gershoni's thesis.

Question 1: Was there indeed a shift in historiographic paradigms between scholars associated with the “history of ideas approach” and those associated with the “new social history of the Annales school”⁵⁹

My answer is a guarded yes. Rereading the studies classified under the new narrative reveals that about a quarter continue to focus on ideology and its (alleged) dissemination to the mostly illiterate populations at large.⁶⁰ In so doing, the syntactic line of argumentation employed (not to be confused with its content) does not differ so significantly from the approach of the old scholars assessed earlier. In terms of explanatory status, ideational factors in these new studies outweigh political, economic, or social factors (although they do not displace them). Furthermore, intentionally or not, Gershoni himself seems to support this conclusion in arguing that during the 1920–45 period, Arab nationalism “moved from the intellectual periphery to the cultural and political center” and thus provides “an outstanding case-study in processes of intellectual formation, ideological dissemination, social reception, and political institutionalization of an idea.”⁶¹ Perhaps even the pre-1970 old narrators did not summarize as concisely the top-down causality on which their idealist thesis of national emergence rested.

Before I move to the second question about the characterization of the new, post-1970 studies, it is worth adding that the overrating of the explanatory role of the realm of ideology in the study of nationalism in the Middle East might represent a wider trend in Middle East studies. As a former editor concluded, IJMES' “dominant topic has certainly been ‘political thought and ideology,’ to which we could add several articles under the heading of ‘political Islam.’ Ideology (religious and secular) accounts for almost one-quarter of the articles published by IJMES [from 1994 to 1999].”⁶²

Similarly, in an exchange in IJMES on the relevance of Anderson's imagined-communities thesis to the Middle East, the otherwise disagreeing protagonists continue to overrate the explanatory weight of opinionated writings of ideologists in affecting the working and forms of the Egyptian national movement while simultaneously marginalizing sociopolitical and economic factors. Key idealist-informed terms include individual ideologists' “articulation” and “formulation” of nationalist “perspective,” “terminology,” or “discourses.” The protagonists seem to have sidelined, even if unevenly, the chief explanatory element—print capitalism—on which Anderson's thesis of national formation rests. While one side highlights the ideological work of intellectuals, the other overemphasizes the role of territory and the state.⁶³

Both are secondary to Anderson's print capitalism and his emphasis on institutional containers (censuses, maps, museums, etc.) that underlie national formation. Either way, the idiom “imagined communities” was meant to be neither a catch phrase (as it has been during the past two decades) nor a concept allowing for even a small group of individuals, regardless of geography, simply to decide to imagine itself via ideological discourse into something collective out of pure will.

Hence, phrasing such as “Hasan al-Banna was the key figure in the formulation of the new imagined community of the Muslim Brothers”⁶⁴

seems problematic. An ideational or discursively based approach does not appear to be the “imagining” Anderson advanced. Rather, the dependent outcome that the all-in-all neo-Marxist Anderson termed “imagined community” can come into existence only if the objective presence of some major material, technological, and institutional mechanisms conjoin to make possible the bottom-up transformation of collective consciousness. At any rate, de-ghettoizing the study of nationalisms in the Middle East—perhaps like the study of the area generally—seems to require further relaxation of the explanatory role assigned to the ideational realm in shaping the macro-sociopolitics of the region.

Question 2: In what sociopolitical context were the new, post-1970 studies written? This question is prompted by the claim that “the new narrative evolved in the 1970s and 1980s when Arab nationalism was in retreat. Just as the [pre-1970] old narrative had developed in the glow of Arab nationalism's political heyday, contemporary events on the ground again impinged on historians' reflections on the past. A more generous view of historians' integrity would attribute the change to the greater distance from the formative period of Arab nationalism, as well as to the benefits of a quieter atmosphere enabling a less charged and possibly more neutral discussion of the subject.”⁶⁵

Was this indeed the case?

Rather than giving a guarded yes, my answer is “perhaps,” because there seems to be another, significantly more decisive sociopolitical context shared equally by the pre-1970s old narrators and post-1970s new narrators. This context seems to override Gershoni's dichotomous description. Let us acknowledge candidly the shortcomings shared by many scholars of the Middle East. Whether it was during the 1950s and 1960s or during the 1970s and 1980s; whether it is the old or new narrators, it seems that one of the more consequential contexts within which studies on Arab (or Jewish) nationalism have been written is the context of the Israeli–Arab conflict. For better or worse, this context has unleashed an “Israeli-prone” school or side and an “Arab-prone” school or side that splits the scholarly community (even if this split must be understood loosely since each “school” does have internal divisions that are nevertheless weaker than the general one). If the Arab–Israeli conflict has been so decisive, then the claims concerning “the retreat or glow of Arab nationalism's political heyday” or “contemporary events on the ground” or “a greater distance from the formative period” or “a quieter atmosphere” seem secondary when juxtaposed to the conflict that has tortured the region unabatedly and that has manifested itself, with more or less subtlety, in the scholarly writing on many of its associated subjects, including Arab (and Jewish) nationalism. As exemplified next, this appears to have been the case equally before and after 1970 with regard to the old and new narratives. It is worth adding that such interaction between intense sociopolitical context and written academic texts is far from unique to the Middle East.⁶⁶

Broadly put, the Israeli-prone school or side has preferred to portray the Arab world as fragmented and provincial. It has tended to highlight the “artificiality” of Arab nationalism, stressing the salience of non-national, parochial, and primordial loyalties such as religion, tribe, ethnicity, and sect. Even articles' titles, such as “Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity” and “Arab Unity: A Nonexistent Entity”⁶⁷

—reflect these notions. As Giacomo Luciani and Ghassan Salame have dryly remarked, the “demise of pan-Arabism is recorded time and again as if some found pleasure in constantly writing its obituary.”⁶⁸ However, the Arab-prone school or side stressed the opposite—that is, the commonalties and unifying factors shared by Arabs regardless of “non-national” loyalties or states. In addition, as far as its analysis of Zionism and Israel is concerned, diametrical arguments about national “artificiality” have been advanced that, in terms of syntax, have mirrored those of the Israeli-prone school or side.⁶⁹

Accordingly, within the invention-of-tradition school, scholars superbly expose the conscious search of various Arab states for a “usable” past through a meticulous analysis of archeology, culture, and art.⁷⁰

Such studies could have been extended comparatively to include, say, the obsessive Zionist search for a “usable” Jewish past in Arab Palestine, but for whatever reason, they have not. Similarly, one study correctly emphasizes that nationalism was imposed on Iraq and that the state is not a nation-state.⁷¹ It seems that European Jewish nationalism in pre-1948 Palestine, or post-1948 Israel, could easily have been the object of a similar line of argumentation. Yet such comparative dimensions, which alone can open possibilities for conceptual and theoretical traveling to non–Middle East scholars, have seldom been explored. On the continuum's other end, Abdelwahab Elmessiri's The Land of Promise⁷² and Roger Garaudy's The Case of Israel⁷³ unveil economic and sociopolitical inner mechanisms linked to the formation of Zionism/Israel that have rarely been addressed as meticulously in the more traditional scholarship. But neither presents as penetrating an analysis of the formation of Arab nationalism. Only a handful of scholars have succeed in engaging in a simultaneously thorough analysis of Zionism/Israel and the Arab world.⁷⁴

A related factor that seems to testify further to the limits of the distinction between old and new narratives, and the dichotomous contention concerning their producing sociopolitical contexts, is that equally intense disputes divide not only old and new narrators but also the new narrators themselves. An example of the former is the dispute concerning why, when, and by whom Egyptian Arab nationalism originated, as argued, on the one hand, in Elie Kedourie's “Pan Arabism and British Policy”⁷⁵

and Nadav Safran's Egypt in Search of Political Community, and on the other hand, in Ralph M. Coury's “Who ‘Invented’ Egyptian Arab Nationalism?” For the former two, both classified as old narrators, Egyptian Arab nationalism largely originated in religious motives of the Egyptian Palace and thus did not manifest itself before 1943. For the latter, a “new” narrator, the “rigid dichotomization between an Arab Islamic orientation of the Palace and a secular liberal and [non-Arab] Egyptian orientation of the Wafd…is false.” In addition, “[T]he growing interest of various forms of Arab unity…reflect new political and socioeconomic developments within Egypt and the Arab world and are not best understood…in terms of dynastic ambitions or the reassertion of…Islamism.”⁷⁶

Yet an example of an even greater dispute (in terms of its scope and scholarly implications for the study of the whole Middle East) concerns the role that Jewish nationalism played (or did not play) in the formation of Arab nationalism as argued in Yehoshua Porath's In Search of Arab Unity⁷⁷

and in Bassam Tibi's extended introductory chapter in the 1989 edition of his Arab Nationalism (1971).⁷⁸ For the former, classified as a “new” narrator, “the effect of the developments in Palestine during the years 1936–39 stands as perhaps the single most important factor which contributed to the growth of 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.”⁷⁹ For the latter, a “new” narrator as well the actions of early Arab nationalists “cannot only be explained by the Palestine issue and it is completely wrong to reduce Arab nationalism…to a response to Zionism.” Furthermore, “[I]f the findings of this book on Arab nationalism in which I do not deal with [the Palestine question] are correct, then Porath must be wrong.”⁸⁰ To sum up this section, mutually exclusive narratives and fundamental disagreements split the “old” and “new” narrators of the formation of Arab nationalism as much as they split the “new” ones. When coupled with the claim that the Zionist–Arab conflict is a decisive context affecting the writing on Arab (or Jewish) nationalism, and that this was the case equally before and after 1970, these issues add doubt to the validity of the distinction between “old” and “new” itself.

Thus far, the answer to the first question posed vis-à-vis the characterization of the post-1970 new scholarship is a reserved yes, while the answer to the second question is perhaps. But it is the last question that perhaps embodies the greatest implications for the relative idiosyncrasy typifying the study of nationalism in the Middle East and the possibility to de-ghettoize this scholarly domain.

Question 3: Was a notable or widespread employment of conceptual tools introduced in the theoretically minded scholarship on nationalism to the study of Arab nationalism by the regional scholarship that Gershoni identified as new when read vis-à-vis the old studies?⁸¹

I think that the answer to this third question is neither a guarded yes nor a perhaps, but probably a no.⁸²

Gershoni's unfolding of the new narrative rests on a thematic linking of twenty articles and nineteen books about diverse aspects related to the formation of Arab nationalism.⁸³

These studies are assigned under a single meta-historical roof because they constitute a paradigmatic shift with regard to the study of Arab nationalism. As far as I can tell, examination of these thirty-nine studies via a disciplinary prism of comparative politics indicates that (1) all but two studies were most likely written by scholars trained as historians and working from within history departments⁸⁴; (2) with the exception of three additional studies, the remaining thirty-four exclude definitions or discussions of key terms such as “nation,” “nationalism,” “nation-state,” or “state” (which should not be considered self-explanatory)⁸⁵; (3) none of these seem to introduce what can be described as a guiding theoretical or conceptual framework for answering their respective research questions⁸⁶; and (4) of the thirty nine post-1970 new studies, thirty-four do not mention, via quoting or bibliographic listing, the theoretically minded comparative studies or scholars of nationalism on which Gershoni's characterization of the new narrative and his co-authored introduction rest.⁸⁷

Having raised these points, I want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with these truly lucid thirty-nine studies, all the more so given that all were written by leading scholars of the Middle East. There is, in addition, no question at all regarding their indispensability for the work of all successive historians and comparativists of the Middle East alike. Gershoni is correct to argue that these studies have treated “previously unresearched topics and cited new evidence” and perhaps slightly less correct to say that they have employed “innovative methodologies.” But Gershoni is not so correct to conclude that these studies have enabled “a thorough rethinking of the history of Arab nationalism.”⁸⁸

The necessary condition for a thorough rethinking of the emergence and consolidation of any sociopolitical collectivity, including that of Arab nationalism, is precisely that found in the nonregional studies Gershoni highlights: a clear theoretical and conceptual framework within which the empirical evidence is placed and by which it is tested, interpreted, and, ideally, elucidated. Put differently, even access to all sociopolitical, economic, and cultural journals, dailies, pamphlets, documents, data, or memoirs, coupled with fully uncensored Public Records Office and regional archives cannot in themselves deliver such a good. Even such an ideal research setting could at best produce a facilitating condition for such an aim as a thorough rethinking of the formation of Arab (or Jewish) nationalism. If one could conjoin these necessary and facilitating conditions—that is, innovative theoretical framework with solid empirical evidence—then one might produce the sufficient condition for the thorough rethinking of the formation of Arab (or any) nationalism.

Gershoni appears to have projected the collective hopes shared by many scholars of nationalism in the Middle East into past scholarship. In so doing, he may have mixed what ought to be with what is. The “struggle” of primary-source citations and counter-citations among various historians of Arab nationalism concerning who said or wrote what to whom and when, whether it was in a remote party meeting, lost lecture, hidden op-ed column, classified British report, neglected conference, or new memoir, falls within the facilitating requirement specified earlier. Gershoni seems to have overrated the change that has been brought to the study of Arab nationalism by what he termed the “new narrative” for one main reason. Whereas new evidence based on primary sources has certainly surfaced since 1970, it still seems that no theoretical or conceptual innovation (resembling that developed in the non-regional studies he applauded) has been fashioned, or applied, by the otherwise excellent studies on which his meta-historical characterization rests.

This seems to mirror the chief factors producing the somewhat idiosyncratic character of the domain of Middle East studies. Only shared theorizing, meta-historical frameworks, and conceptualization can link scholars of diverse geographical areas and de-ghettoize their discussions to make them meaningful, and hence possibly useful or applicable, for the efforts of colleagues of other regions. To endorse conceptual traveling does not imply that the sole aim of an integrated comparative research program is to apply universal conceptual categories across regions and periods. It is true that “there is simply no substitute for detailed and contextualized knowledges of specific regions—including their languages, histories and cultures” and that “no solid comparative or conceptual understanding of the world—past or present—can be built without this foundation.”⁸⁹

It nevertheless seems that there really is not a serious shortage in such contextualized, specialized forms of knowledge as far as the Middle East is concerned, while there certainly is a shortage of fertile theorizing, conceptualization, and comparative outlook that either originates from the region or involves it. Accordingly, rather than a meta-historical conceptualization of past scholarship, Gershoni's thesis can perhaps be better read as a guiding research plan on Arab nationalism for the new millennium. So far as the study of nationalism in the Middle East is concerned, the insights offered in comparative scholarship on the phenomenon of nationalism seem to await more complete incorporation. I conclude this article by identifying a theme that is equally neglected in the comparative and regional studies of nationalism—a theme that can perhaps open additional venues for narrowing the gap between these studies.

The pre-1948 Arabized-Jewish Communities and the Dynamics across Jewish and Arab Nationalisms

Until the conclusion of the first Israeli–Arab War in 1948 there were some 750,000 indigenous Jews living in nine Arab states. Most of these Jewish communities had lived in the region continuously for many centuries. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the intensifying conflict between the European Zionists and Palestine's indigenous Arabs negatively affected the sociopolitical position of these Jewish communities.⁹⁰

Their position became more complex than that of other indigenous minorities precisely because the Palestine conflict was between Jews and non-Jews. (Had there been, for example, a British-sponsored Coptic Zionism or Nestorian Zionism in Palestine, then similar repercussions probably would have affected Egypt's Copts or the Nestorians of Iraq.)

During these years, the fundamental distinction between Jews and Zionists eroded further and further throughout the region. This slow, elusive process worked to the exclusive advantage of the European Zionists, who for various reasons had an interest in making the terms “Jew” and “Zionist” synonymous. The first reason was to create the impression that Zionism was the majority stance among world Jewry (while Zionists at the time were actually a significant minority among all Jews, whether African, Asian, or Euro-American). The second reason was to persuade international powers of their “obligation” to recognize Jewish nationalism as the sole solution to the (European) Jewish question that allegedly expressed the wishes of the majority of Jews worldwide.

A core factor in the post-1948 triumph of the European Zionists resulted from their success in furnishing some of their fiercest Arab enemies across the national divide with their self-made conceptions, terms, and logic. From the late 1930s onward, a growing number of “radical” secular or religious Arab nationalists began to identify non-Zionist indigenous Jews as constituting a potential Zionist fifth column. In Egypt, important subnational movements, such as the Muslim Brothers and Misr al-Fatat, embraced, for all intents and purposes, the Zionist conflation between Judaism and Zionism. In Iraq, the pseudo-secular, pan-Arab Istiqlal Party effectively became the most xenophobic of all organized Arab movements toward indigenous Jews.

The identification between Jews and Zionists practically culminated in an unintentional collaboration across the Jewish and Arab national movements between Zionist forces that aimed for the ingathering of Jews to Palestine and several of their presumably fiercest Arab opponents whose actions increasingly aimed at pushing indigenous Jews out of Arab societies and states (without having a concrete final destination in mind). Neither the European Zionists in Palestine, nor the illegal emissaries they installed throughout the region beginning in 1942, nor the minority of Arabized Jews who collaborated with them were profoundly aggrieved by this exclusionary development within Arab nationalism. This development simply worked to the advantage of European Zionism in materializing its principal dictums—that is, hisul ha-galut (liquidation of the exile) and

aliya (emigration) to Israel. Hence, the consolidation of a hegemonic identification between Jews and Zionists was a double-edged enterprise running back and forth across the Jewish and Arab national movements. Although initially advanced by the European Zionists, the identification was duplicated and nourished by important Arab subgroups across the national divide.

The unintended alliance structurally formed across the Arab–Zionist national divide between the “enemies” considerably affected the direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East followed in the post-1950s period. Israel doubled its population and demographically became much less “European” than it had been. In the Arab world, competing subgroups within the Arab national movement that advanced more inclusionary bases for collective identity and self-determination—such as regional, linguistic, and class-based—were seriously fractured by, and had to respond to, the region's relative politicization of religious affiliations (initially Judaism and later Islam). The strength of subnational liberal and Marxist groups in Egypt and Iraq struggling to institutionalize Arab self-determination on a firm interreligious basis, for example, correlated negatively with the strengthening of separatist Jewish nationalism. It is unclear how the latter could have aided the democratic, multireligious Arab cause.

Across Serbian and Croatian Nationalisms

To enhance the study of European politics via Middle East-based theoretical insights such as those outlined earlier, it is worth recalling the initial breakup of Yugoslavia while limiting the focus to the evolving conflict between Serbia and Croatia. Rogers Brubaker's analysis of the conflict highlights “the complex interplay of three overlapping and mutually intensifying processes: the nationalization of the Croatian incipient state;…the increasing disaffection, and nationalist mobilization, of Serbs in the ethnic borderlands of Croatia; and the development of a radical and belligerent ‘homeland’ stance in the incipient Serbian state.”⁹¹

Two processes heightened the politicization of the Croatian Serbs: the radical “homeland” stance of Serbia and the nationalizing Croatian movement (especially under Franjo Tudjman) that attempted to assert ownership and control over the territory and institutions of Croatia through a process of Croatization of the state's economy, language, and cultural symbols. These parallel developments evoked fear among Croatian Serbs, induced militant mobilization, and eventually led to an armed rebellion against the Croatian regime. When the plight of Kosovar Serbs became known, it was seen as a threat to minority Serbs everywhere. After Tudjman's election, this threat was seen as acute in Croatia, which was portrayed as the fascist successor to the Ustasha state. Serbia, under Slobodan Milosevic, had no reservations about encouraging Croatia's borderland Serbs to oppose the new Croatian regime and the Croatian bid for independence. The Croatian Serbs were later provided with arms for these purposes. Serbian claims to speak for Croatian Serbs, by challenging Croatian sovereignty and reinforcing fears of aggressive Serb hegemony, helped push the Croatian government toward a stronger assertion of sovereignty in the rebellious borderlands and to a more uncompromising position regarding the form of independence it demanded.

Reading this historical brief against the previously sketched Middle East sequence, it is possible to think of the Croatian Serbs as structurally occupying a sociopolitical position roughly comparable to the one to which the Arabized Jews were relegated in the 1940s (particularly when Zionism/Israel began to “speak” for them as Serbia spoke for the Croatian Serbs and when Israel and Arab states began their respective Judaization and Arabization projects similar to the Croatization process mentioned earlier). Notwithstanding these similarities, differences are also evident. Most striking, the Arabized Jewish communities were never a part of any secessionist struggle within Arab states as Croatian Serbs (eventually) were within Croatia. Precisely in this context, investigation across the Serbian and Croatian national movements—comparable to the one outlined earlier in relation to Jewish and Arab nationalisms—might help to understand the Serb–Croat matrix. Such a quest seems absent in Brubaker's account, which concludes candidly:

Indeed, Brubaker notes in passing that intransigent opposition to Croatian independence prevailed among village and smalltown Croatian Serbs while it was hardly present at all among Zagreb's cosmopolitan Serbs. Yet, like subnational dynamics, subethnic struggle within a given minority cannot be ignored, because it is crucial for a full understanding of the national outcome in the region one studies. A paradigmatic example is the serious rift that always existed between the minority among Iraqi Jewry who committed themselves to the “external Jewish homeland” in Palestine and the majority of non-Zionists among them—liberals, Marxists, or religious orthodox—who opted, as Iraqi citizens, for allegiance to the Iraqi state. It seems plausible to suggest that an analysis of the sequence of events surrounding the Croatian Serb minority community, positioned at the edges of both Croatian and Serbian nationalisms and situated in a volatile border zone between them, can shed explanatory light on the subsequent national outcome in the region. A complementary analysis within and across Croatian and Serbian nationalisms via the Croatian Serbs, comparable to the one outlined earlier with regard to Jewish and Arab nationalisms via the pre-1948 Arabized Jews, is likely to deepen studies of the outcome of the Serb–Croat conflict and the consolidation of national collectivities in the former Yugoslavia.