Was pan-Arabism ever feasible?

Pan-Germanism is not pan-Germanicism
Pan-Italianism is not Pan-Italicism
Both failed in the 2nd world war

>bavarians, saxons, prussians etc have more in common with each other

And italy is an even bigger ethnic/cultural clusterfuck still, especially between the north and the south. There are dialects of Italian that hardly fucking understand each other.

yet there was an Italian and German cultural identity that existed before those states. The individual Arab states on their own are scarcely unified around a common identity.

Not with Al-Saud and wahhabists undermining everything.

>PAN
>ARABISM

>yet there was an Italian and German cultural identity that existed before those states.

There is pretty fucking clearly an Arab cultural identity given that there was a pan-Arab movement, they all speak Arabic, share a religion, and many were part of the same historical polity for fucking centuries.

The German and Italian nation were no less "natural" than if some charismatic Arab had done the same somewhere else. Yes there would be differences between, say, a Palestinian, an Egyptian and a Tunisian, but it wouldn't be much more remarkable than that between a Sicilian and Piedmontese or a Bavarian and a Prussian.

>they all speak Arabic
True but this is misleading. Most westerners don't realize that the colloquial speech of people in say Egypt and Iraq is no more intelligible than that of France and Spain necessarily though both are called "Arabic". Educated people in both countries will know how to speak a literary standard based on the language of the Koran just as educated spaniards and frenchmen could communicate in days gone by in Latin.

What are the distinctions?

>Yes there would be differences between, say, a Palestinian, an Egyptian and a Tunisian, but it wouldn't be much more remarkable than that between a Sicilian and Piedmontese or a Bavarian and a Prussian.
The problem is this just isn't true. And as it happens the Palestinians themselves can barely cohere as a nation. Same with the Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese et cetera

This user is correct.I'm an Arabic linguist for the military and as a non-native I cannot understand certain dialects because they're just too different from what I've been trained on. We even have some native-born Arabs who struggle on dialects that they weren't raised with. There is a "Standard" Arabic, but only the elites bother to learn it to fluency and the common people generally have a pretty poor grasp of it

>Most westerners don't realize that the colloquial speech of people in say Egypt and Iraq is no more intelligible than that of France and Spain necessarily though both are called "Arabic".

So?

Many Italian dialects were just as troublesome, particularly before unification. Most European countries had to grapple with vastly different languages/dialects.

It's also worth noting that many Chinese can't understand each other either.

In a much more confined geographical area with a people with a culture far different

China has also had a history stretching back thousands of years of some sort of central authority holding power over a large chunk of their modern borders, so there is a strong precedent. There have been massive Muslim Arab empires but they all fragmented and didn't have the same level of organization the Chinese dynasties had.

The real question is: why is Nasser so overrated? He was, when you actually look into it, a military and political failure.

If OP is looking for some kind of objective way to measure what levels of cultural difference are too great to create a unified state and which aren't you are going to be disappointed. There is no objective answer. The crucial question is whether people are willing to subjectively see themselves as members of one nation. Is the Shi'a-Sunni divide in any objective sense more profound than that of the Catholic-Protestant? Not really? The difference is that westerners have long ago evolved to the point culturally that they no longer care to kill each other the contents of the communion cup whereas Arabs cannot get over who the rightful successor to Mohammed was and thus Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon cannot even function as unified nation states. why then should we expect them to function if they were all united with Egyptians and Omanis thrown into the mix?

You can nitpick literally every example for why they're the exception to your shitty rule, but your rule is a shitty rule. The diversity across Arab states isn't an explanation for why a pan-Arab state is unfeasible.

That's only the ground level reason why it could never have worked. There is also the more immediate reason Pan-Arabism failed: the elites of each state could never reach an agreement on who would be in charge and the Arab monarchs, clinging to their petty kingdoms were not interested in it in the first place. Italy and Germany were able to unify for the most immediate reason that Piedmont and Prussia *forced* them to unify

Read these things:

Arabs suffer from the fact that they're hilariously terrible at war and that war is the only way large countries are forged

If the argument "pan-arabism failed because there wasn't a state strong enough to force unity" then yes, I agree. That said, it got on that topic as a consequence of an user saying that the unified states had "more in common with each other" and that their "cultural identity existed before those states". Neither of those factors do I think were particularly damning to a pan-Arab movement.

I'd say yes, if Nasser had actually tried to make the Egyptian/Syrian union work and not just made it greater Egypt and excluding Syrians from the new power structure.

>But it worked in Italy and Germany

Italy is united, but is worse off for it.
The German state does not encompass all of what used to be thought of as German, e.g. Austria, and when they tried to unite it caused World War 2.

>and when they tried to unite it caused World War 2.

Anschluss didn't cause World War 2.

None of the Arab countries apart from Egypt and Oman have a proper identity.

They should just split the Arab nations into 3 super-states: the Maghreb, the Levant, and the Gulf.

>Neither of those factors do I think were particularly damning to a pan-Arab movement.
read the first part again,.

>Yemen has no proper identity
>Morocco has no proper identity
wut

it caused the conflict with Poland for trying to retake the territories that were lost after World War I

This is a terrible example. The amount of violence that erupted during the creation of this nations numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and the aftermath ballooned to millions.

Arabs are perhaps the most tribalistic people on the face of the Earth, so no. It took the formation of a new religion to truly unite them in spirit for a few decades and then they quickly devolved back into tribal feuds, albeit at a larger scale.

yourmiddleeast.com/opinion/why-panarabism-has-failed_20085

In the end arabs themselves don't see other arabs as their "brothers"
Ask any arab from say Morocco or Syria if they believe themselves to 100% exactly the same as one another and the answer will be no. the examples you're giving of Italians and Germans are small scale and easy to assimilate. for whole countries to drop their entire culture and adopt a foreign one dictated by a foreign entity who only shares your religion (but not sect) is a lot more difficult. for example Moroccan culture and what it means to be a moroccan might be similar to Algerian but it's definitely not the same as Libyan and Tunisian might be similar to Libyan but it's definitely not similar to egyptian etc
Add to this the simple fact no one likes to call themself an arab anymore. in Iraq there's assyrians, kurds, turkmen, yazidis etc. in Syria the same thing. in Lebanon there's "pheonicians". in Egypt there's copts. and in north africa there's whole millions of native non-arabs who are simply sick of being expected to quietly arabize and join in on the panarab jerk fest.
for these reasons and many other Panarabism is and will always be a meme we wuz ummayads autists jerk off to

> implying anyone will read this

I agree with you; the nation-state format has created insular - or at least in-ward looking - cultures out of the Middle East, making pan-arabism impossible. The development of sub-cultural identities within these nations adds an additional buffer, or perhaps serves as evidence of the successful cultivation of the modal nationalist form. I am not too familiar with the region's history, but it may have been possible in the early 20th century after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, as an anti-colonial moment before the respective nation-states were fully formed and naturalized.

Arab jihadists are very good at war though

All talk of subculture and dialect are secondary to the fact that Pan-Arabists had to deal with already established nation-states with already established political elites. Prussia, Sardinia-Piedmont, and China had to steamroll over their rival states and aristocracies to unite, and that never really happened with the Arabs.

they can do terror attacks to bring down current ruling regimes but they lack the ability to create a decent governing structure in its place

because one faction finally won the reunification wars

They're good at asymmetrical warfare but this isn't useful for keeping power in an actual state.