The death of Arab nationalism

Just as the demise of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia closed the lid on national communist parties in Eastern Europe, the demise of Saddam Hussein in Iraq appears likely to do the same for secular Arab nationalism across the Middle East.

And just as communism exited the European stage exposed for what it always truly was — fascism without fascism's ability to make the trains run on time — secular Arab nationalism will exit the stage revealed for what it always was: a despotic perversion of the nation-state that lasted as long as it did mainly because of secret-police techniques imported from the former Soviet Union.

Arab nationalism's roots go back to the revolt against European colonialism in the early decades of the 20th century. But as it developed, it faced a serious problem: Because it was organized around the artificial national borders that these same colonialists had drawn — which generally ignored ethnic and sectarian lines — the result, in too many cases, was multiethnic rivalry and the subjugation of one part of the population by another.

In Iraq, for instance, the national borders created a state in which the majority Shiites were subjugated by the minority Sunnis (as we all now know). In Syria, the majority Sunnis came to be subjugated by the minority Alawites, who constitute a branch of Shiism (and who had been favored in the armed forces by the French). In Lebanon, it was the Shiites who ended up subjugated by both Christians and Sunnis.

No sooner were these independent new states created than the ties of faith and tribe were undermining them. A fragile unity of sorts could be achieved only by recourse to secular nationalism, which, on paper at least, aimed to transcend those bitter rivalries.

Indeed, the more artificial the state, the more extreme the secular ideology had to be to hold it together. To secure unwieldy tribal assemblages, for instance, an austere state socialism was required in Algeria, and a form of "Dear Leader Absolutism" in Libya. Because Syria and Iraq also were artificial constructs, these two states resorted to Baathism — another bastardized form of state socialism.

Contrast all this with places such as Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, age-old civilization clusters whose identities, rather than artificial, harked back to antiquity. It should be no surprise that these places produced more benign forms of secular government.

The two extremes in the Arab world became Tunisia and Iraq. Tunisia, a small country of Sunni Arabs with no internal divisions, which traced its borders back to ancient Carthage, produced Habib Bourguiba, the Arab version of the enlightened Turkish modernizer Kemal Ataturk. Iraq, a Frankenstein monster of a country assembled from warring ethnic and sectarian groups by the British, produced Saddam Hussein, the Arab Stalin.

The defining fact of the Cold War years in the Middle East was competition among these insecure new states for the right to inherit the mantle of the deceased Ottoman Empire, which had held sway over most of their territories for centuries. Because Israel served as a symbolic replacement for European colonialism, each new state tried to outdo the other to prove its anti-Zionist bona fides.

Egypt, the Arab world's demographic hub, had the advantage, especially as its leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, psychologically mobilized the Arab masses by standing up to an invasion by Britain, France and Israel in October 1956, leading to a withdrawal of these "colonial" powers from the Suez Canal. Thus began the high-water mark of secular Arabism, which lasted until Nasser's humiliation by the Israelis in the 1967 war.

The Palestine Liberation Organization emerged in the waning years of Nasserism. It was modeled after the other secular nationalist movements — so much so that its foundational text, the 1938 book "The Arab Awakening," was written not by a Muslim but by a Greek Orthodox Christian, George Antonius. Another Christian, George Habash, became one of the PLO's most radical guiding lights.

The defining organizational attribute of secular Arab nationalism was the military emergency regime — witness Egypt, Syria and Iraq — that justified its existence by the continued state of war with Israel. Also working against liberal change in the Middle East was the influence of the Soviet Union. With Soviet military and economic aid for the secular nationalists came the techniques of Eastern Bloc security services.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the two Baathist countries, Syria and Iraq. The result of made-in-Moscow surveillance techniques was the emergence in the early 1970s of a new class of dictator — Hafez Assad in Syria and Saddam in Iraq — who, unlike their predecessors, were not overthrown by yet another general or colonel after a short time in office.

These new men stayed in power for decades because anyone who opposed them, no matter how furtively, was soon identified and destroyed.

Thus it was that the Nasserites, the Baathists from Syria and Iraq and the austere pseudo-Marxists from Algeria vied with each other for influence. The PLO, as the supreme symbol of the anti-Zionist struggle, was the beneficiary of the competition. But when the Berlin Wall collapsed and aid from the Eastern Bloc began to dry up, Palestine had still not been liberated, even as creaky, authoritarian bureaucracies across the Arab world were decaying.

Beneath the carapace of secularism, a disturbing brew of religious and sectarian tensions had always simmered. Islamism emerged from an upwardly mobile peasantry that had drifted into Arab cities from the countryside. In the countryside, Islam was an integral part of a traditional existence and generally nonpolitical, but in these pseudo-Westernized cities, filled with the worst sorts of temptations, religion required a severity and ideological component in order to keep families together and teenage boys from slipping into crime.

Alas, what really killed secular Arab nationalism — much more so than the dark influence of the Soviet police state or the mobilizing distraction of the Zionist threat — was the combination of a bad form of urbanization and what Middle East expert Michael Hudson in the 1970s labeled the "primordial identifications" of tribe and sect and religion.

As the secularized Arab state withered, these sub-state loyalties re-emerged full bore, making further mockery of the borders of the Arab world — because tribe- and faith-based communities have little use for national borders.

Those who proclaim today that the only real solution to the Arab dilemma is political freedom are correct. The problem is that they are describing a process that could encompass several bloody decades. After all, it took centuries for stable democracy as we know it to evolve in Europe.

In this Darwinian shaking-out process, the new forms of political legitimacy may more closely resemble militarized social-welfare organizations such as Hezbollah and the Al Mahdi army than the ramshackle contrivances of the European model that we saw in the post-colonial era.

Right before the trap door was opened, Saddam's executioners chanted "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada," referring to Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr — because what was supposed to have been retribution for crimes against humanity had, despite all of our efforts, turned into another sectarian killing. Such is the abyss that follows secular Arab nationalism.

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy; he is the author of "The Arabists," among other books.