Arab states' connect: "monarchies & life-long presidencies face common internal & external challenges, work closely on "intelligence & security"

OxfAn: Excerpts:

"...Arab nationalism, or Arabism -- a sense of shared nationhood and identity -- was a creation of the colonial period in the Middle East after the First World War. Related to pan-Arabism -- the aspiration for political union -- it owed its strength to historical, cultural and linguistic factors as well as a widely shared belief that the Arab world had been artificially divided by the Western powers and could only defend itself properly by finding a way to overcome these divisions. Lack of consensus. However, there was never a workable consensus as to how Arab nationalism should be expressed at the political level:

• The League of Arab States (or Arab League), founded in 1945, was an uneasy compromise between the larger states such as Egypt and Iraq, who wanted a strong form of cooperation, and weaker ones such as Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait who feared political and economic domination by more powerful neighbours.
• Such fears heightened when former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser took up the Arab nationalist cause, appealing to the peoples of the Arab world over the heads of their leaders, and then dominated Egypt's three-year political union with Syria from 1958.
• The cause was dealt a further blow as a result of the comprehensive and humiliating defeat of the Arab armies by the Israelis in 1967, after which the surviving Arab regimes chose to reduce their exposure to an ideology that seemed threatening to their own political survival.

The result was a type of political balancing act, as each regime sought to preserve its own independence while finding non-threatening ways of demonstrating the Arab credentials on which its popular legitimacy still depended. Manifestations of local sovereignty, and growing divisions over particular issues (such as the wars in the Gulf), meant that projects for greater cooperation languished.
Alternative paths. The end of attempts at total political union paved the way for various experiments in sub-regional unity. Of these, the first and most successful has been the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), established in 1981. This was followed by the revival of an earlier attempt at an Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) embracing Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia in 1989 and the very short-lived Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) consisting of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and North Yemen in the same year.
All such unions have focused on greater economic integration on the lines of the European Common Market. However, all have ended in a large measure of failure for a variety of significant reasons, including:

• the unwillingness of regimes and their crony allies to abandon control over large parts of their own economies
• the lack of the complementarities needed to promote increased trade -- including oil, as important non-oil states (notably Syria and Egypt) began to exploit their own mineral resources;
• the pull of rival schemes for partial economic unions -- for example, the US-supported Qualified Industrial Zones scheme between Israel, Palestine, Jordan and, later, Egypt, or the EU's Mediterranean Initiative; and
• the global opportunities provided by membership of the WTO.

Official Arabism today. In spite of the stress on individual national sovereignty, the separate Arab states remain connected in more significant ways than other parts of the non-European world. These include:

• the ties of language, culture, history and religion which, although more tenuous as far as the states of North Africa are concerned, are still a significant part of regime legitimacy due in part to their continued resonance in popular thinking and experience;
• systems of monarchical or life-long presidential government with similar centralised structures, all of which face common internal and external challenges and work closely with their military and security advisers
• the inter-connectedness provided by flows of oil and gas and the presence of several million workers of Arab origin in the oil states; and
• the exploitation of geographical proximity to connect power grids, natural gas pipelines, and systems of transport, particularly between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as with increasingly important economic neighbours such as Turkey.

Unofficial Arabism. The people of the Arab world are deeply connected by an unofficial web of ties, including student movement between different Arab universities, creation of Arab think tanks, intra-Arab tourism, Arab professional associations and so on. There are also the remains of a vocal Arab intellectual and cultural elite which shares a common language of Arab nationalism, demonstrated in their journalism, novels and poems, as well as more formal expressions of Arab nationalism demonstrated in the local contributions to documents such as the UN Development Programme's Arab Development Report.
Other ties that have become of great significance in recent years include:

• what might be called the 'September 11 effect', by which Arab investors prefer to keep their money in the Arab world rather than risk having it seized in European and US banks on account of its alleged use to support 'terrorism';
• the impact of specifically 'Arab' television stations such as Al-Jazeera (launched 1996) which concentrate on specifically pan-Arab themes such as the Palestinian cause, inter-state relations, divisions between rival pan-Arab and Islamic ideologies and so on;
• the development of what has been called an Arab 'blogosphere' which has created a new public sphere for the discussion of Arab-centered ideas and experiences, notably a fear of splits (for example, between Sunnis and Shias) and a shared sense of the need to confront censorship and to fight political apathy; and
• an Arab audience for films and especially television serials such as those broadcast during the month of Ramadan which deal with common historical themes. ...

There can be little doubt that many of the ties which bind the Arab world together will continue, and in many instances, multiply during the 21st century. This, in turn, will provide both a space and an opportunity for economic, commercial and cultural expression which does not require a formal structure of treaties and of agreement to create new inter-governmental institutions. However, governments will maintain the present practice of informal cooperation without being willing to commit themselves to anything which places significant restraints on their sovereignty.