Pan-Arabism

Pan-Arabism is the political ideology holding that Arabic-speaking peoples across the Middle East and North Africa share a single nation that should be politically unified or closely coordinated, formally organized for the first time with the founding of the Arab League in 1945. Its legitimacy claim is that the Arabic-speaking peoples constitute one nation defined by shared language, history and culture across borders drawn by colonial powers, and that political authority is rightly exercised in the name of that single Arab nation rather than in the name of any one of its separate states. Michel Aflaq, who co-founded the Ba'ath Party in Damascus in 1943 with Salah al-Din Bitar, supplied its most influential intellectual formulation, fusing Arab nationalism with a socialist critique of colonialism and of the traditional elites who had ruled under it. It reached its high point under Gamal Abdel Nasser's leadership from the 1950s into the 1960s, including the 1958 to 1961 union of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic, and shaped the founding platform of the Ba'ath Party, though rival national governments' unwillingness to cede power kept it from producing lasting political union. Pan-Arabism is best understood as a variant of nationalism pitched at the level of a whole language and culture rather than a single existing state, which is also why it has repeatedly come into conflict with the narrower state nationalism, sometimes called Wataniyya, of the individual Arab governments it has asked to cede sovereignty.