Political scientists specialising in the Middle East hold that the precise definition of the state applies to only three of the region’s countries: Egypt, Turkey and Iran. According to this view, Egypt is the only one among the Arab countries to which the definition of the state, in the precise sense used in political science, applies. The matter may differ from the perspective of the legal definition of the state, which raises the number of states in the Arab region to 21. Although the legal definition is important because it rests on the concept of sovereignty exercised by the ruling authority, this definition is insufficient for dealing with the problem related to state-building. Hence the importance of the technical meaning used in political science, which focuses on aspects neglected by the legal definition (which reduces the state to a territory, a people, a government and international recognition), and which helps us to detect the weakness and fragility that may afflict the state and threaten its existence. Nor does the legal definition help explain the structure of power within the state and the relationship and interaction between its components, the pattern of the relationship between the three powers (legislative, executive and judicial), the nature of civil-military relations, or the form of the relationship between the state, society and the individual citizen. Likewise, the legal definition does not help us understand the different forms of states. By contrast, the political definition allows us to draw on the general and sub-disciplinary systems of knowledge concerned with the study of the state, among them political science, political sociology, political economy, administrative science and anthropology.
Applying the political definition of the state, one notices that Egypt occupies a prominent position among the three Middle Eastern states referred to. Besides being the oldest state known to the recorded history of humankind, it has enjoyed, since the founding of the modern state at the hands of Muhammad Ali and his sons, stable borders and a cohesive entity, geographically, socially and in human terms, despite its diversity. Egypt within its current borders was the centre of imperial projects that were aborted over the course of history, and it also enjoyed a distinguished status under the empires that succeeded one another in the region, from the Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire. If we look at the map of the areas that were ruled from Egypt until 1840, we can understand the logic behind the current shape of the international order of the Middle East region, from the perspective of the European powers that were competing at that time over the legacy of the sick man of Europe. But the ability of nation-states to survive and endure was not dependent only on the will of external powers; rather, it rested on social formations and on supportive internal factors that preserved the survival of the nation-state, or the territorial state, in its current form, despite the crises associated with the process of state-building.
Egypt and the Crisis of the Nation-State
The nature of the current crisis of the nation-state in the region cannot be understood without understanding the founding beginnings of the formation of the state system in the Arab Mashreq region, which includes Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine under the Mandate, without going back to its roots in the circumstances that led to the Treaty of London in 1840, which expressed the response of the major European powers to what was known at the time as “the Eastern Question”, and which many observers portray as a colonial conspiracy to curtail Egyptian influence and to lay down rules, still in force today, for the major powers’ dealings with the latent capabilities of the Egyptian state, rules that can be summed up as preserving the minimum necessary for the survival of the state, curbing its regional influence and reducing its ability to exert influence beyond its borders, especially in the Levant and the Arab Mashreq. The Treaty of London, signed on 15 July 1840 between the Ottoman State and four European powers, namely the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, Prussia (regarded as the nucleus of the German state) and Britain, was an attempt to support the Ottoman State in the face of the ambition of the Wali of Egypt, and to set limits on the expansion of Egypt’s regional influence under the leadership of Muhammad Ali, who had exploited the unrest in the Ottoman provinces in the Levant, after these states had succeeded in reducing Egypt’s military power by destroying its fleet in the naval Battle of Navarino in October 1827.
Egypt’s rulers apparently accepted, and still accept, the limits that the major powers set on its regional influence. After a short period of rejecting the terms of the agreement, with the support of France, Muhammad Ali was forced to accept them on 27 November 1840, in order to preserve his gains in Egypt and to focus on building the state in Egypt, after extracting the support of the major European powers and their recognition that Egypt would have a special status under his rule and that of his sons after him. They introduced reforms that produced a cohesive political and social entity guaranteeing the continued existence of the Egyptian state, relying in that on Egypt’s historical status and its continuous existence over centuries despite the succession of invaders who came at it from every direction. This agreement ended the Second Egyptian–Ottoman War by removing the Egyptian military force from the Levant, but it did not succeed in solving the problem there, which was known as the crisis of the Mashreq and is manifested in the crisis of nation-states made up of multiple nationalities, sects and ethnicities, which makes any possible political change an existential threat to the state itself, with the possibility of its disintegration into several statelets or warring emirates, something that threatens regional stability. The crisis of the state is embodied in Iraq, in Syria and in Lebanon, and to some extent in Jordan, despite the throne’s success in preserving the stability of the kingdom in the face of regional challenges linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which led to internal challenges because of the demographic composition, in which Palestinians form a majority, and an overwhelming majority in the capital, Amman.
The modern state project adopted by Muhammad Ali and his sons played a pivotal role in crystallising Egyptian identity by the end of the nineteenth century. This distinct national identity, culturally and socially, had begun to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the French Campaign gave it a new push, until it was embodied at the beginning of the twentieth century in the “Egypt for the Egyptians” project. This Egyptian identity thus became the foundation that gave Egyptians a confidence that enabled them to deal with the peoples of the region in the Arab, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean surroundings, and that made Egypt a cultural centre in the world despite the British military occupation; most importantly, it was the main pillar on which the project of the modern nation-state was built. But there is nothing to justify feeling reassured about the survival of the state on the strength of an extended historical legacy of a central state that is almost the one constant truth in Egypt’s ancient history. The talk repeated recently that the state in Egypt is not an exception, and that its existence may be threatened, is nothing but an expression of an anxiety that has troubled many Egyptians since the early eighties, when a document was circulated, attributed to an Israeli journalist named Oded Yinon, a former employee of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, about a Zionist plan to divide Egypt into statelets. This document gained currency because of a fixed, unchanging belief that the fragmentation and division of the region is a goal pursued by Israel and the international powers that support it.
The problem with this belief is that it prevents us from seeing the changes under way, whether regarding the Israeli or international conception of the region or regarding the nature of our nation-state crisis, and leads to viewing any critical analysis of this crisis as serving this Zionist-American conspiracy, or the Jewish conspiracy against the world, in the Islamists’ expression. This is how some viewed the statements of the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, in 2016, when he said “We are not in a real state… rather, semblances of a state”, pointing out that the real state is “a state of law and institutions… a state that respects itself and that the world respects”, even though this statement reminds us of President Sadat’s talk of building a state of institutions after he had settled the power struggle in his favour in May 1971. The problem is that the President himself often issues numerous statements that warn Egyptians and reflect his adoption of this belief that there is an international conspiracy targeting the Egyptian state, in the face of the opposition’s criticism of his domestic policies. Such statements are also of no use in analysing the nature of the double crisis that Egypt suffers with regard to the crisis of the nation-state in the region, which challenges the legitimacy of the entities that gained their independence from the colonial powers one after another in the years following the Second World War.
The Territorial State and the Nationalist State
The late Lebanese thinker George Tarabishi has a book entitled “The Territorial State and Nationalist Theory”, also published at the beginning of 1982, in which he tries to theorise the phenomenon of the territorial state in the context of the theory of Arab nationalism, which puts forward the unity of the Arab countries as a basic means not only of continuing the project of national liberation and completing its tasks, foremost among them the liberation of Palestine, but also as a mechanism for achieving a comprehensive renaissance in the region and for it to take its rightful place on the world map. The problem here is that the Arab regional order, whose institutional expression is the League of Arab States, was established to defend the borders of the states that emerged after colonialism, whereas the Arab nationalist thinkers who dream of Arab unity regard these territorial states and their ruling elites as a basic obstacle on the road to achieving Arab unity, and as having an interest in maintaining the reality of fragmentation, which they consider a basic cause of the crises and catastrophes the Arab peoples face, as manifested in the recent war on Gaza. There is another unionist project competing with the project of Arab unity, namely the project of Islamic unity, and the two projects have much in common in their position on the territorial state, or what we call in this article the nation-state.
Although the Egyptian elite has been linked since the forties of the last century, and before, to the project of Pan-Islamism and then to the project of Pan-Arabism, which expresses shifts in that elite’s perception of Egyptian identity in the decades preceding this shift, documented in the book “Egypt’s Identity between Arabism and Islam 1900–1930”, Egypt strongly defended the existing nation-states in the region on more than one occasion since the fifties, with regard to Sudan’s independence from Egypt and with regard to Lebanon and Kuwait, while encouraging voluntary unionist experiments, in some of which Egypt itself was a main party, and which failed because of the strength of the post-independence political elites’ commitment to the nation-state they had inherited from the colonial era, which had become an institutional reality that is difficult to ignore. But there is another problem related to the concept of the state in the Arab-Islamic experience, which many Arab thinkers and writers have addressed, and which the Qatar-based Palestinian nationalist thinker Azmi Bishara treated with further analysis in his book “The Question of the State: A Treatise on Philosophy, Theory and Contexts”, published in 2023, in which he tried to formulate a concept of the state from a critical humanist perspective, in an attempt to theorise the concept of the modern state as a basis for a project of rebuilding the state in the Arab region and in the Middle East region, a subject closely related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as well; he also pointed to the need to theorise the concept of the state in light of the shifts in political thought associated with the phenomenon of globalisation and the post-state stage.
This article is also an attempt to reopen the debate on the crisis of the nation-state at a time when there is growing talk of maps being redrawn for the countries of the region in line with perceived Israeli and Western interests. The basic hypothesis from which the article starts is that the crisis of the nation-state in the region is not linked to the reality of fragmentation and the failure of the imagined projects of Arab or Islamic unity, but is linked mainly to the failure of the ruling elites to build the nation-state and to crystallise the national identities that would make it more confident in opening up to the world and to projects of regional cooperation, and in building an effective regional order capable of enabling the group of states that make it up to advance the peoples of the region economically, socially and intellectually. In other words, this article tries to address an essential dimension overlooked by the Arab discourse concerned with re-proposing a project of Arab unity along the lines of the European Union project, one related to the idea of the modern state founded on citizenship and the rule of law, the idea that made the dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa possible on the basis of the principle of equal rights of citizens in a democratic system and a law that achieves equality for the people of the new state, in accordance with the principles stipulated in many Arab constitutions, which have never moved from the texts into reality.
Between Empire and Further Fragmentation
To understand this point, it is necessary to distinguish between the concept of the state and other concepts that may overlap with it, such as the concept of the political system or the government. But understanding the overlap between the state and these concepts and arrangements, and the interaction among them, is necessary to understand the nature of the crisis of the post-colonial nation-state in the region on the one hand, and the nature of the crisis of the Egyptian state on the other, especially in light of the recent developments in Syria after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s rule and the perceived risks threatening the existence of the Syrian state. Although Iraq, with its three components, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish, withstood similar risks threatening its existence in the wake of the Kuwait war in 1991, which worsened in the wake of the American invasion in 2003, there are still risks threatening to change the shape of the political entities formed in that region because of their social formations and conflicting political creeds, and because they are an arena of conflict and competition among three imperial projects, which in turn invites international and regional interventions. There are other challenges pressing on the concept of sovereignty, which is a basic pillar in the definition of the state in the legal sense and also in the political sense, some resulting from shifts in the structure of the global political economy due to globalisation, and others resulting from the development of international norms and the organisations that support them.
In this context, in which internal factors overlap with international and regional ones, this article tries to understand the crisis of the nation-state and to find out how dealing with the various dimensions and repercussions of that crisis could affect the map of the Middle East region. What are the consequences of the current developments in the Arab Mashreq region resulting from the prolonged conflicts over the current political entities? And how can Egypt deal with these developments and with the crisis of the nation-state, in light of the arrangements and constraints established since 1840 and afterwards, and what is the impact of this on Egypt’s future as a state? Unlike earlier periods in the region’s history, during which neither the entity of the Egyptian state nor its national identity was affected by developments in the region, Egyptians, rulers and ruled alike, may sense an existential danger, reinforced by a sense of external threats and risks resulting from the major shifts in the strategies of the major international powers, especially the United States, in light of the presence of regional powers aspiring to impose their control over the region, as a result of the decline of Egypt’s effective and influential role at the regional level, and because of its internal crises, which affect its ability to adapt to changes and deal with them.
Regrettably, the strengths that Egypt enjoyed, foremost among them its national identity, have undergone some changes as a result of the rise of primary loyalties, especially religious loyalty, and tribal, clan, family and regional loyalties, because of major political shifts at both the global and local levels. This situation may make Egypt able to deal with the crisis of the nation-state in the region, at a time when its states face an existential threat that may result in the actual disintegration of political entities into sectarian, tribal and ethnic statelets whose loyalties are distributed among larger regional powers, or in the political entities remaining as they are but being divided up into zones of influence of the competing regional powers, or in their being swallowed up into an imperial entity if one of the imperial projects achieves a clear and decisive victory. This situation requires thinking about the question of building the nation-state and preserving its foundations as a minimum for withstanding the challenges mentioned.
Failed State Theory and Nation-Building
It is striking in this regard that President El-Sisi has linked talk of the failed state with the war of rumours against which he warned Egyptians, a link that does not serve the progress of dialogue on securing Egyptian society and the state against internal and external risks. This conception cannot be separated from the continued confusion between the state and the political system, and from the other conceptions related to the function of the state and its relationship with the individual citizen and society from the perspective of the modern state. Although philosophers and thinkers throughout the ages have agreed on the necessity and importance of the state, and agreed on defending its legitimate right to monopolise binding authority, they differed over the purpose or the wisdom behind this monopoly and over the nature of the goals the state seeks to achieve, which range between providing a decent life, maintaining security and public order, or managing the affairs of society and preserving its members’ right to life and defending their right to freedom. Many philosophers hold that the state was established to defend the freedom and rights of the individual against other, more tyrannical entities. Philosophers and thinkers agree that the exercise of the state’s binding authority and obedience to it are not absolute, but conditional and restricted by the laws and regulations that set limits on the exercise of this authority, and by working to achieve the goals that citizens regard as basic aspects of the orderly conduct of their lives; citizens care about the results the state achieves.
The distinction between the state and the government is one of the basic principles of political science, which views the government as an agent of the state that carries out its purposes; it is not in itself the supreme binding authority, but derives its authority from the powers vested in it by the state and within their limits, and the government is held to account if it exceeds these limits. The state relies on means such as written constitutions, laws on the rights of individuals and the principle of the separation of powers to prevent the government from misusing the authority that the state grants it. Some Western theorists who coined the term “failed state” fell into this confusion: the state as an abstract concept cannot be dealt with in terms of success or failure; rather, what succeeds or fails are the governments or political systems charged with managing the affairs of the state. The problem in Syria, or in any Arab or non-Arab state, lies not in the existence of the state but in the governments or regimes of rule that have succeeded one another over it, in the struggle for power in order to control the state and its institutions and to run it in an undemocratic manner that does not serve the interests of the vast majority of citizens, in the swelling of the state to the point that it destroys the social agencies capable of providing protection to individuals belonging to social forces, and in the marginalisation of peoples and ruling them by force, iron and fire.
The key to dealing with the crisis of the nation-state in the region begins with dealing with the crisis of building the modern state that works in the interest of its citizens and works to empower them. In Egypt, some circles in society see 2025 as “the toughest political test for the Egyptian state”, because of the shifts Syria witnessed, which gave the current of political Islam new momentum, and because of the insistence on portraying the crisis in Egypt as if it were the result only of interventions by foreign intelligence services, which seek to use such predictions to influence citizens psychologically and to pave the way for certain changes in favour of other projects, by encouraging the stirring up of chaos. The crisis of the nation-state can only be dealt with by confronting the manifestations of political, economic and social deterioration and collapse from which many Arab countries suffer, among them Egypt. Denying the problem does not help prevent the catastrophe, and acknowledging its existence is often the prelude to a solution, and this solution must lead to Egypt becoming a real state in which no one is above the law, a state that affirms the concept of the sovereignty of the people, safeguards the freedoms and rights of citizens and strengthens society’s ability to organise itself through independent civil entities.
Egypt’s message must be clear to all regional and international parties, namely that any maps of the future that push towards fragmenting the states of the region into statelets and emirates will only lead to further destabilisation of the region and of states and societies. The maps of the future must start from the idea of the nation-state, which Egypt has long defended, and from preserving its territorial integrity and social stability and working to build the modern state within these borders; building these states, reassuring their ruling elites, securing them against any external threats and encouraging them to deal with the internal issues and problems related to state-building processes would open the way in the future to more stable and beneficial relations at the regional and international levels, and open the door to solving many complex problems and crises.
