One historical approach to state-building in the Middle East distinguishes three countries for their institutional and historical continuity: Egypt, Turkey and Iran. On this reading, Egypt occupies a distinctive place among Arab states. This is an analytical perspective, however, not an agreed definition that denies other countries their status as states.
The legal perspective is different: the Arab League has 22 member states, including Palestine. Legal definitions matter because they address sovereignty and elements such as territory, population, government and the capacity to conduct international relations, alongside competing understandings of recognition. But they cannot, by themselves, explain the problems of state-building.
A political analysis allows us to identify weaknesses and forms of fragility that may threaten a state’s survival. It examines the structure of power and the interaction of its components: relations among the legislative, executive and judicial branches; civil–military relations; and the relationship between the state, society and the individual citizen. It also helps distinguish different forms of state, drawing on political science, political sociology, political economy, public administration and anthropology.
Viewed in this light, Egypt occupies a prominent position among the three countries mentioned above. It is one of the oldest states in recorded history. Since the modern state-building project of Muhammad Ali and his successors, it has retained a cohesive historical core, geographically, socially and demographically, despite its diversity, while its borders continued to evolve.
Egypt has been the centre of imperial projects that were ultimately thwarted, and held a distinctive position within successive empires, from Rome to the Ottomans. Looking at the territories governed from Egypt before 1840 helps explain the logic through which European powers approached the regional order as they competed for influence over the Ottoman Empire, later widely described as the “sick man of Europe”.
Yet the survival of the region’s territorial states never depended on outside powers alone. Social formations and supportive domestic factors also sustained them, despite the crises accompanying state-building.
Egypt and the crisis of the nation-state
Understanding the present crisis requires looking at the formation of the state system in the Arab Mashriq, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Mandatory Palestine. Although the mandate system emerged in the twentieth century, the historical roots of the regional balance reach further back, including to the circumstances surrounding the London Convention of 1840 and Europe’s response to the “Eastern Question”.
Many commentators interpret that settlement as a colonial effort to curb Egyptian influence, establishing an approach to Egypt’s potential that, in their view, persists: preserve the minimum conditions for the state’s survival while limiting its regional influence and its ability to project power beyond its borders, especially into the Levant.
The London Convention of 15 July 1840, signed by the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Austria, Prussia and Britain, sought to support the Ottoman state against the ambitions of Egypt’s ruler and to limit Muhammad Ali’s regional expansion amid unrest in Ottoman Syria. This came after the destruction of the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet at Navarino in October 1827 by British, French and Russian forces—a different combination of powers from the signatories of the 1840 convention.
Egypt’s rulers appear to have accepted, and to continue to accept, the limits imposed by the major powers on their regional reach. Muhammad Ali initially rejected the settlement with French support, but ultimately had to accept it. The Alexandria Convention was concluded on 27 November 1840 as part of this process. Preserving his position in Egypt meant turning towards state-building at home, with European support for a distinctive status for Egypt under his dynasty.
The reforms introduced by Muhammad Ali and his successors helped consolidate a political and social entity capable of sustaining the Egyptian state. They drew on Egypt’s historical continuity through centuries of successive invasions. The settlement that ended the second Egyptian–Ottoman war removed Egyptian forces from the Levant, but did not resolve the deeper problems of the region.
Those problems are visible today in the crises of states composed of multiple national, religious and ethnic communities, where political change can become a threat to the state’s existence and raise the possibility of fragmentation into warring entities. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon illustrate this predicament. Jordan faces aspects of it too, although the monarchy has preserved the kingdom’s stability amid challenges arising from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. People of Palestinian origin form a substantial part of Jordan’s population, but widely circulated claims of precise demographic majorities are not established by a recent official census.
The modern state-building project of Muhammad Ali and his successors played a central role in consolidating Egyptian identity by the end of the nineteenth century. A distinctive cultural and social identity had developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, receiving a further impetus from the French expedition and later expression in the slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians”.
This identity gave Egyptians the confidence to engage with neighbouring Arab, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. It helped Egypt become a cultural centre despite British military occupation and, more fundamentally, provided a foundation for the modern nation-state.
A long history of centralised statehood is no guarantee of survival. Historical continuity cannot substitute for the institutions and social relationships that sustain a modern state.
The recurring claim that Egypt is no exception to the threats facing other states expresses an anxiety that has troubled many Egyptians since the early 1980s. An essay by Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist and former Foreign Ministry employee, circulated widely for its discussion of Egypt’s fragmentation into smaller entities. It expressed its author’s strategic vision; the essay alone does not establish that the Israeli government adopted an official plan of this kind.
Its popularity reflected an entrenched belief that Israel and its international supporters seek to divide the region. The problem with treating this belief as an unchanging explanation is that it obscures shifts in Israeli and international thinking, as well as the internal nature of our own state crisis. It can turn any critical analysis into an alleged service to a Zionist–American plot, or into the global anti-Jewish conspiracy narratives invoked by some Islamists.
Some interpreted President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s 2016 statement that Egypt was “not a real state” but a semblance of one through this lens. He described a real state in terms of law, institutions and mutual respect between the state and the wider world. The statement recalled President Anwar Sadat’s language about building a state of institutions after consolidating his power in May 1971.
Yet Sisi also frequently warns Egyptians of an international conspiracy against their state when responding to domestic opposition. Such statements do little to illuminate Egypt’s overlapping crises or the wider questioning of the legitimacy of regional states that gained independence in the decades following the Second World War.
The territorial state and the idea of Arab unity
In his 1982 book The Territorial State and Nationalist Theory, the late Lebanese thinker George Tarabishi examined the territorial state within the framework of Arab nationalism. That ideology presents Arab unity not only as a means to continue national liberation, above all the liberation of Palestine, but also as a route towards a comprehensive renaissance and a stronger place in the world.
The tension is that the Arab regional system, institutionally represented by the Arab League, defends the borders of the postcolonial states. Arab nationalist thinkers who aspire to unity often regard those states and their ruling elites as obstacles, arguing that they have a vested interest in preserving fragmentation. They see that fragmentation as a principal cause of the crises and catastrophes confronting Arab peoples, as the latest war on Gaza has demonstrated.
A competing project is Islamic unity. Both projects share important reservations about the existing territorial state—what this article calls the nation-state. The distinction matters: here, a territorial nation-state refers to an existing country, while the wider Arab nationalist project envisages political unity across those countries.
Egyptian elites were associated with ideas of Islamic solidarity and later Arab unity before and during the 1940s. These shifts in their understanding of Egyptian identity were explored in Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930.
Nevertheless, from the 1950s onwards Egypt repeatedly defended existing states in the region, including in relation to Sudan’s independence and the cases of Lebanon and Kuwait. It also encouraged voluntary experiments in unity, participating in some itself. Their failure reflected, among other factors, the strength of post-independence elites’ attachment to the states they had inherited from colonial rule—entities that had become institutional realities impossible to ignore.
There is a further problem concerning the concept of the state in Arab–Islamic experience. Many Arab thinkers have addressed it. The Qatar-based Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara examined it at length in his 2023 book The Question of the State: Philosophy, Theory and Context. He approaches the concept from a critical, human-centred perspective, seeking a theoretical basis for rebuilding the modern state in the Arab region and the Middle East.
This debate is closely connected to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It also requires rethinking the state in light of changes in political thought associated with globalisation and discussions of a post-state order.
The central argument here is that the regional crisis arises primarily from ruling elites’ failure to build states grounded in citizenship and the rule of law—not simply from fragmentation or the failure of imagined Arab or Islamic unity.
This article seeks to reopen that discussion at a time of mounting speculation about maps being redrawn to serve perceived Israeli and Western interests. Building confident national identities would make states more willing to engage with the world and with regional cooperation. An effective regional system could help its members advance their societies economically, socially and intellectually.
Debates about reviving Arab unity along the lines of the European Union frequently overlook a fundamental question: the modern state must rest on citizenship and the rule of law. Equal citizenship within a democratic legal order was central to the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. Comparable principles appear in many Arab constitutions, yet too often remain confined to their texts rather than becoming lived realities.
Between empire and further fragmentation
It is essential to distinguish the state from related concepts such as the political regime and the government. Their interaction, and the confusion between them, help explain both the region’s postcolonial crisis and Egypt’s particular predicament. Recent events in Syria following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, and fears for the Syrian state’s survival, make that distinction especially urgent.
Iraq, with its Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and other communities, has withstood comparable existential pressures since the 1991 Gulf War, intensified by the US invasion in 2003. Yet the region’s political entities remain vulnerable to changes driven by their social structures, competing political ideologies and their position as arenas of rivalry among imperial projects. Such competition, in turn, invites further regional and international intervention.
Other pressures bear on sovereignty, a central component of both legal and political understandings of the state. These arise from globalisation’s transformation of the international political economy, and from the development of international norms and the organisations that support them.
Domestic, regional and international factors therefore intersect. How might different responses to this crisis alter the Middle East’s map? What will protracted conflicts in the Mashriq mean for existing states? How can Egypt respond to these developments within the accumulated constraints on its regional role, including those shaped by the settlement of 1840? What might this mean for its future?
In earlier periods, Egypt’s identity and state structure retained substantial resilience amid regional upheaval. Today, both rulers and citizens may perceive an existential danger. Major changes in the strategies of international powers, especially the United States, combine with the ambitions of regional powers, Egypt’s declining regional influence and domestic crises that constrain its capacity to adapt.
Some of Egypt’s historic strengths, foremost among them its national identity, have been weakened by the rise of more immediate allegiances: religious, tribal, clan, family and regional loyalties. Major political transformations at home and abroad have contributed to this shift. It may leave Egypt less capable of addressing the wider crisis at a time when other states face existential threats.
Several possible outcomes follow. States could fragment into sectarian, tribal or ethnic entities aligned with larger regional powers. They could retain their formal borders while being divided into competing spheres of influence. Or a decisive victory by one imperial project could absorb them into a larger entity.
Building the nation-state and preserving the foundations of its cohesion is the minimum required to withstand these pressures. National identity must be sustained through citizenship, rather than assumed to survive indefinitely on its own.
“Failed states” and nation-building
Sisi’s association of talk about a “failed state” with a war of rumours is revealing. In my view, that connection does not advance a serious discussion about protecting Egyptian society and the state from internal and external dangers. It perpetuates confusion between the state and the political regime, as well as uncertainty about the modern state’s purposes and its relationship with citizens.
Many philosophers and political thinkers have defended the necessity of the state and its legitimate coercive authority. They have differed, however, over the purposes that justify it: securing a dignified life, preserving security and public order, administering society, protecting life or defending liberty. Many understand the state as an institution created to protect individual freedom and rights against other, potentially more oppressive powers.
Within this tradition, state authority and the duty to obey it are neither unlimited nor unconditional. Laws and regulations constrain its exercise and direct it towards purposes that citizens regard as essential to their lives. Citizens ultimately care about what the state delivers.
Distinguishing the state from the government is therefore fundamental. Government acts on behalf of the state to fulfil its purposes. Its authority derives from powers entrusted to it and is limited by those powers; it should be held accountable when it exceeds them. Written constitutions, individual rights and the separation of powers are among the mechanisms intended to prevent abuse.
My objection to the term “failed state” is that it can reproduce the very confusion it seeks to explain. The state as an abstract concept is not, in this argument, what succeeds or fails. Governments and political regimes entrusted with administering it succeed or fail.
The problem in Syria, or in any Arab or non-Arab country, is not simply the existence of the state. It lies in successive governments, struggles to control state institutions and undemocratic forms of administration that do not serve most citizens. It also lies in the expansion of state power until it destroys the social institutions capable of protecting individuals, marginalises the population and rules through coercion.
The starting point for addressing the crisis is thus to build a modern state that serves and empowers its citizens. In Egypt, some regard 2025 as the state’s most difficult political test because Syria’s transformation has given political Islam renewed momentum. These concerns coexist with an insistence on portraying Egypt’s crisis as the product of foreign intelligence interference alone: a campaign to manipulate public perceptions, encourage disorder and prepare the ground for rival projects.
The crisis cannot be addressed without confronting political, economic and social deterioration in Arab countries, including Egypt. Denial does not prevent catastrophe. Recognising a problem is often the first step towards solving it.
Egypt needs a state in which no one stands above the law, sovereignty belongs to the people, rights and freedoms are protected, and society can organise itself through independent civic institutions.
Egypt’s message to regional and international actors should be clear: any future map based on breaking existing countries into smaller states and emirates will deepen instability for the region, its states and its societies.
A different future must begin with the nation-state that Egypt has long defended: preserving territorial integrity and social stability while building modern institutions within existing borders. Strengthening those states, reassuring their ruling elites against external threats and encouraging them to confront the domestic challenges of state-building could open the way to more stable and mutually beneficial regional and international relations—and to solutions for many of the region’s most complex crises.
