Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq

Pan-Arab unionism ignited passions and dominated politics in the Middle East throughout the 1950s and 1960s and has continued to reassert itself periodically. In this elegantly written study, Malik Mufti investigates the persistence and the failure of pan-Arab initiatives, examining their significance in the political development of Syria and Iraq.

Mufti's detailed reconstruction of unity plans defies many conventional beliefs about modern Arab political history. In particular, he challenges the perception that a radical populist attachment to anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and pane Arab ideology determined the behavior of Syrian and Iraqi leaders during the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, using Arab political memoirs, interviews with important players in Syrian and Iraqi politics, and recently declassified U.S. documents, he shows how domestic power calculations dominated the actions of Ba'thists and Nasserist elites. He demonstrates, moreover, that their interests often converged with those of the United States, making them beneficiaries of active American support.

Arguing that the inability of Syrian and Iraqi leaders to consolidate their hold on power led them to unit initiatives, Mufti links the gradual ascendancy of raison d'etat in foreign policy to the development of effective political institutions and increased stability in the two countries. The decline of pan-Arabism, he suggests, reflects the creation of political order and the formation of stronger states in Syria and Iraq. By tracing the distinctive trajectory of these parallel transformations, Mufti explains how the tragic histories of Syria and Iraq culminated in the regimes of Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein.