Etel Solingen opens her analysis of Arab regional integration by quoting the UN Development Programme’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report (p. 121):
Perhaps no other group of states in the world has been endowed with the same potential for cooperation, even integration, as have the Arab countries. Nevertheless, while much of the rest of the world is moving towards coming together in larger groupings… Arab countries continue to face the outside world and the challenges posed by the region itself, individually and alone.
If at the end of the Second World War, one were asked to guess whether the Arab or European countries would have more luck integrating in the coming decades, they may very well have made the wrong prediction. After all, Arab countries share a language, a common culture, and — especially in the 1940s — a collective identity. Moreover, they didn’t have much of a violent history with one another, having been Ottoman colonies and later on British or French mandates.
The member states of the European Union and its predecessors, on the other hand, had no shared language (especially in the 1940s), a bloody history of internecine warfare, and — notwithstanding the shared heritage of Christendom — not much of a popular, common identity. Despite these structural challenges to integration, the EU has grown to include increasingly diverse members and has proceeded from technocratic harmonization to the integration of core state powers.
When applying our toolkit from European Studies to the Arab world, the lack of integration is puzzling. New intergovernmentalists, such as Andrew Moravcsik, see state interests and the preferences of domestic constituents as crucial. On this account, things should have gone forward. And indeed there was a consensus that forming a block to counter former colonizers, Israel and the new Cold War belligerents was crucial for Arab independence. Already in 1943, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Pasha al-Said wrote that, “‘sacrifices of sovereignty and vested interests may have to be made’ in order to achieve an Arab union.”
Neofunctionalists, such as the late Ernst B. Haas, are much more interested in elites who work cross-nationally through regional organizations and become socialized into a common identity. The postwar Arab world had that too. The Arab League, founded in 1945, included, just like the original European Economic Community, six members: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria. It had a Secretariat, an executive body like the European Commission, and a Council similar to that of the EU. And as with the European institutions, it was staffed by a transnational, self-consciously pan-Arabist elite.
Postfunctionalists, such as Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, focus on mass publics, whose disinterest can provide a permissive consensus for integration or whose hostility can create a constraining dissensus on elite-driven integration. However, Arab mass publics were much more enthusiastically supportive of regional integration than European ones ever were. One could hardly imagine a European leader in the postwar years using the kind of language that was standard for Egypt’s vociferously pan-Arabist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser:
Nasser told a cheering crowd in Sanaa on April 23 [1964] that when he saw the Egyptians fighting alongside their Yemeni brothers, he “felt that Arab unity is an actual reality, with no need for written documents because it has been written in blood, and with no need for constitutions to announce it because it has been announced by your martyrdom and your self-sacrifice.”
New intergovernmentalists, such as Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson and Uwe Puetter, discuss integration through crises. And the Arabs had plenty of those too. Most notable was the 1948 war against Israel, in which the six armies of the Arab League, along with Yemeni and Palestinian irregulars, were routed by the fledgling refugee state. This defeat had a galvanizing effect, with mass support for the destruction of Israel in vengeance of the Nakba. However, when that opportunity came in 1967, it was another failure, leading to the loss of the rest of Palestine.
The failure of postwar Arab integration is puzzling: the Arab league managed to go to war as one, but not to set up basic technocratic harmonization. Egypt and Syria even joined for a moment as a unitary state, as did the two with Iraq in a more federal structure, but there has never been a functional Arab common market. It is the reverse of Europe— core state powers seem to integrate easily while theoretically easier aspects appear hopeless.
Theories of European integration tend to look at four categories of explanation: bureaucratic elites, mass publics, states, and domestic interests. Each approach to explaining European integration focuses on different ones and interprets their interplay differently. However, as definitionally Eurocentric perspectives, schools of European studies are free to assume stable states in which elections determine who will rule and losers are welcome to vie for power again in the next plebiscite.
Herein lies the crucial difference between the European and Arab contexts. European governments try not to lose elections, but they play a repeating game: if they lose an election, they can regroup as a parliamentary opposition and eventually return to power. For Arab leaders, losing power was more likely to mean exile, imprisonment or death. They could never count on the game having a second round.
Arab integration does not follow the same logic as its European counterpart, but unlike the diffident qualifications of European theorists,1 it is also not completely foreign— it is a mirrored logic. In Europe, public demand for integration was low and so elites proceeded in stealth, not overly fearful of sacrificing power to the commons. This was a double game— loudly proclaiming sovereignty while giving away power in low-salience areas. In the Arab world, the opposite double game occurred— public demand was high and so its leaders offered high-salience forms of integration, but knowing the dire consequences that could arise from giving away power, they undermined it at every turn.
Understanding leaders’ assumptions as to whether and in which contexts they are playing single or repeating games is crucial, though admittedly it can hardly be the only relevant factor. Still, in an environment in which loss of power is temporary and not threatening loss of life or liberty, leaders do not have to be martyrs to take risks. When formulating policy towards the Middle East or any other region, policy makers must consider which of these logics they are buttressing.
Ernst B. Haas was always careful to clarify that his approach was not a theory, merely a local account of how and why a particular historical development occurred. Accepting this or not is, of course, the reader’s prerogative.