It takes more than seminars and conferences to resurrect ways of thinking.
Renovation is a process undertaken by individuals at the intersection between
the needs imposed by the socio-historical process and the course of the history
of ideas. One of the most pressing needs is for thinkers of the type that
embraced the concept of the "Arab idea" and who made their mark in the first
half of the 20th century. Conferences and seminars will not produce them, just
as they will fail to produce any other kinds of innovative thinkers. Ultimately
the task of renewal falls upon the individual who must engage in a creative
intellectual process.
Since Arab national thought is not uniform we should not expect any renewal to
be so. The factors that distinguish it from other trends of Arab thought are
few, but they make all the difference. Even so, the difference is not sufficient
to establish a distinct way of thought. Nationalism that is liberal democratic
in outlook is a world away from nationalism that is fascistic. Nationalism is
not a way of thought but the politicisation of an affiliation and it is as easy
to imagine democratic bearers of the idea of politicising national affiliation
as a platform for the realisation of sovereignty as it is to imagine fascist
ones.
A national movement that transforms itself from the collective awareness of a
common cultural identity as the foundation for an imagined community to a pure
ideology can only ever be totalitarian and meagre: it is totalitarian because it
will strive to define all its stances on the basis of a single tenet, and meagre
because it will do so on the basis of a limited set of shaky premises that offer
few answers. To transform national affiliation into a sovereign democratic
nation is a modern concept, as is fascism. The two, though, are antithetical.
What are the distinguishing features of Arab national thought?
First, it recognises the existence of an Arab national identity that has the
right to sovereign national expression. Secondly, it holds that Arab national
theory and the policies derived from it should be founded upon the higher
collective interest of the whole, as opposed to only a part such as the sect,
tribe or region.
While these points might suffice to distinguish Arab national thought from the
bodies of thought that do not recognise Arab national identity they do not offer
a sufficient platform for running a country. They cannot define a position on
democracy, civil rights or education or healthcare policies. This is why early
Arab nationalists had such divergent views on what constituted the most urgent
concerns of their countries.
It is precisely for this reason that persons such as myself believe that
democracy offers the best means for a nation to express its will, that the
complementary side of sovereignty is the principle of equal citizenship and
civil rights and that social rights, such as medical insurance, free education
and labour rights are an integral part of nation-building. It is also for this
reason that people of different outlooks and temperaments might translate the
two distinguishing premises of Arab national thought into completely different
outward expressions.
It is because of the outward expressions -- the regimes and movements -- that
Arab national thought has taken that there is a need for renovation. Arab
national thought fossilises when its proponents are marginalised from the
political and social process and when the thought itself becomes no more than an
ideological prop for a ruling regime.
The major obstacle to the fertility of political thought founded on the premise
of the existence of an Arab national identity with the right to sovereign
national expression resides in the practices of the proponents of the idea who
exercise power in countries such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq. This obstacle impairs
the idea itself -- the idea of a sovereign nation -- for it is because of their
practices that unity cannot be achieved even between neighbours. Every instance
of the scrambling for excuses not to unify only succeeded in miring Arab
nationalist thought in scandal. The practices of Arab nationalists in power also
proved an obstacle to renovation in Arab thought on democracy because their
attitudes towards citizen rights, public supervision of power and civil
liberties undermined the credibility of those other Arab nationalist thinkers
who explored such issues.
The second major obstacle to the development of Arab national thought is that
Arab nationalists are marginalised in those societies in which they do not
participate in government, at best confined to an opposition that vocalises its
support for Arab unity and which rejects normalisation with Israel as opposed to
constituting a dynamic opposition that offers a democratic alternative to the
existing government of society. Arab nationalist thought cannot evolve outside
attempts to rise to the challenges posed by the concrete concerns of the people,
among which are social rights, civil rights, democracy and questions of
identity.
Attitudes and policies on such issues cannot be directly derived from the
national idea itself because, in and of itself, the idea does not provide the
answers to such questions. The task of finding answers falls upon the proponents
of the idea, and the more the proponents of the idea produce answers to the
people's pressing needs and concerns in the form of political platforms and
policies the more they will contribute to the development of national thought.
In other words, Arab national thought can only evolve within a practical
environment. All attempts to derive positions from the abstract are in essence
doctrinal and pave the way for totalitarianism.
Developing Arab nationalist thought entails clarifying its position in favour of
democracy and civil and social rights. It is a task that assumes a clearer and
more constructive direction through practice. Practice in the context of social
currents and political trends not only offers concrete answers but alleviates
the utopianism of the answers provided by angry national revivalist theory, the
other face of dogmatism, another fringe language remote from the actual lives of
the people and the dynamism of political and social activity.
Renewed Arab national thought will have to settle, through practice, the
question of democratic citizenship as organic to the state (as opposed to
organic to the affiliation). When it does it will find that the way to Arab
unity is not through the imposition of theory from above but through the
exercise of grassroots democracy, as was the case with the European Union. Also,
through practice and involvement with the people Arab liberals, who have been so
frustrated by their marginalisation from politics and society to the extent of
airing admiration for Israeli democracy, will find themselves not only ready to
condemn the Israeli version of democracy as a colonialist model but will also be
capable of appreciating the achievements of Arab nationalists and not just their
flaws and failures.
When proponents of Arab national thought, democratically inclined and
open-minded, deal directly with the needs of the people they will discover their
own sources of strength. For example, they will discover that identity is not an
airy theoretical concept but a pressing popular concern with tangible
ramifications and that Arab identity, in contrast to sectarian and tribal
identity, is one of the sources of the strength of the Arab national movement
and its thought.
National thought, as defined by the two primary premises mentioned above, is a
modern mode of thought. A nation is an imagined community, but it is not
imagined out of nothing. Its constituent elements exist and they include such
ingredients as language, culture and a shared history (ethnicity, by contrast,
is an imagined common origin or even common ancestry). Modernity is what
furnishes the instruments, such as the press, channels of communication, and
even the rise of the middle class, needed by a nationalist ideological drive to
transform the constituent elements of an imagined community into a sovereign
state.
Arab nationalism is no less modern than other national movements. It is not to
be confused with Arabism, which has existed for more than a thousand years. It
is not based upon a concept of an imagined ethnicity founded upon a common
ancestry. It embraced many non-Arabs (in the ethnic sense) at a time when
Arabism was an urban movement made up of intellectuals, members of a rising
middle class and officers in the Ottoman army and merchants. Arab national
identity is not about blood or ethnic bonds, it is about an imagined community
with the tools of language and modern communications to help it become a
sovereign nation. The theoretical underpinnings of this quest are what make up
Arab nationalist ideology.
This type of theorising was common in countries with delayed capitalist
development, in which an advanced capitalist economy was not around to unify the
market and the state in a natural way, and in which absolutist monarchies also
failed to perform this task. As a result we have nationalist ideologies that
arose on the ruins of crumbled empires, as opposed to evolving in tandem with
the evolution from an absolute monarchy to a nation state. Take, for example,
the cases of Turkish and then Arab nationalism which emerged from the collapse
of the Ottoman Empire, or the case of the nationalist ideologies that arose on
the ruins of the Hapsburg Empire, or those that are still in the process of
coalescing following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The more recent such nationalist expressions the more adamantly they feel they
must justify themselves. However, not every national ideology is justifiable and
there is no reason why the democratic nationalist should not look favourably
upon the alternative of living in a multinational democratic country.
Yugoslavia, for example, could have become such a multinational democratic state
instead of a series of bloodbaths and ethnic cleansings on the way to the
establishment of several separate "democratic states". National purity as
grounds for secession and as a condition for establishing an ostensibly
democratic state is an almost certain road to massacres, ethnic transfer and the
spread of totalitarian ideology.
When we speak of citizenship in Arab national thought we must recall that just
as Arab nationalism is an imagined community seeking sovereign expression, there
are non-Arab groups living in Arab countries. Not only must we recognise that
the individual members of these groups should be endowed with full rights of
citizenship but also we must recognise the collective rights of groups that
continue to define themselves as non-Arab and that seek to express their
national identity.
These are some of the challenges that the renewal of Arab national thought must
meet. But they cannot be met without engaging innovatively and practically in
the attempt to address the problems and concerns of the people. Nor can they be
met without summoning the humility needed to treat with critical respect the
intellectual and practical heritage bequeathed by earlier generations of Arab
nationalists.
* A Palestinian intellectual from Nazareth and a former member of the Israeli
Knesset.
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