Why did European nationalisms succeed while Arab nationalisms failed

  There are many significant differences that led to European success and Arab failure, including the time difference, as Arab nationalist thought began with the end of European nationalist thought, It can be said that the communist revolution was a sign of the end of European nationalist thought and the beginning of internationalist thought, which is the opposite of nationalist thought, The beginning of Arab nationalist thought was historically linked with the end of European nationalist thought, The Arabs took many concepts from European nationalist thought, but the supply of new European nationalist concepts to Arab nationalist thought stopped almost with the cessation of the growth of European nationalist thought and the beginning of the stage of internationalism in Europe.

The Arab countries were an Ottoman colony, and there was acceptance by the Islamists of the Ottoman situation, because in their view the Ottoman Caliphate was not an occupation but rather an extension of the Abbasid Caliphate,The Arabs or Arabized peoples did not dare to openly express their nationalist thought until after the provocation practiced by the Committee of Union and Progress movement, which practically isolated the Ottoman Caliph Abdul Hamid and began Turkifying the colonies, This prompted, especially after the Ottoman Sultanate became weak, some, especially those of Lebanese origin, to practice the opposite and opposing thought (Najib Azoury and after him Antoun Saadeh) to consider the Caliphate as a continuation and not an occupation, according to the concept of the necessity of “submission” to the Ottomans.

The emergence of Arab nationalist thought was not the result of a conflict with religious thought, as was the case in Europe, but rather the result of the conflict with the Ottomans, In Europe, secular thought triumphed, and as a result, secular democratic national authorities were formed, The opposite happened in the East, The authorities that ruled the Arab countries, especially in the Levant, after Sykes-Picot were nationalist, and after 1928, these nationalist authorities became infused with political Islamic thought, Then it was said that Arabism is Islam and Islam is Arabism, These nationalist-Islamic authorities were neither secular nor democratic, There in Europe, religion and state were separated, and here in the Middle East, religion was merged with the state, Is it any wonder that dictatorships failed and democracies succeeded? Therefore, European nationalist thought succeeded and Arab nationalism failed.

The Arab world could not have reached the state of misery we witness today had Arab-Islamic nationalism not committed fatal errors that European nationalism, a revolution of immense positivity and innovation, particularly in the realm of freedoms—the freedom of the individual, the freedom of the nation, the liberation of religion from superstition, the liberation of women, and liberation from ignorance—did not commit. What transpired in the Arab region, however, was a kind of reckless, forced obsession, Arab nationalism focused all its attention on overcoming dependence on the West and liberating itself from Western colonialism, after the West had liberated these peoples from Ottoman colonialism, This ideology cannot be blamed for its relentless pursuit of liberation from foreign colonialism, However, in this regard, it remained stagnant for decades, Colonialism ended immediately after the end of World War II, and the problem seemed to have ended, yet the struggle against colonialism persisted as if colonialism were still present, Arab nationalism reveled in this stagnation, enabling it to exploit this inertia to perpetuate its own existence, or rather, the existence of its own ideology. The militarism that adopted it accompanied the struggle for liberation from a colonial tyranny that no longer existed with the relentless effort to entrench an internal, despotic colonialism. In other words, the illusory pursuit of national liberation was accompanied by the creation of dictatorships that enslaved the citizen and robbed him of his freedom, This phenomenon of liberating the homeland while enslaving the citizen—the Arab-Islamic nationalist dictatorships failed to understand that national liberation can only be achieved through the liberation of the citizen, and that the contradiction between liberating the homeland and enslaving the citizen, building more prisons for more citizens, cannot be reconciled, Thus, the homeland was liberated from poverty by impoverishing the citizen, from ignorance by keeping the citizen ignorant and destroying educational institutions while establishing Quran memorization centers, Then came the claim of developing civil society, but through a security state that killed civil society, Combating fundamentalism was achieved by creating the conditions that enabled it to grow and expand, a phenomenon that surprised many in the region after the Arab Spring uprisings, All of these errors, and we could mention many more if space allowed, were not practiced under European nationalisms. The opposite of what was mentioned, so there was success and here is the opposite of it, i.e., failure.

European nationalist thought arose in independent states, while the Arab states where Arab nationalist thought emerged were not independent,The external challenges faced by Arab states differed radically from those faced by Western states, which possessed independence and the ability to make their own decisions, It was in the West that the Enlightenment was born and succeeded in influencing Europeans, who lived in scientific, industrial, and secular societies, The Enlightenment, transmitted from Europe to the East, did not have the same significant impact, Enlightenment concepts did not find sufficient positive engagement in the culturally backward, tribal East, Furthermore, hostility and rejection of the West persisted, rooted in several factors, including religious sentiment and envy, which often transforms into hatred and rejection, Other issues relate to the role of religion and the relationship between religion and politics, a relationship that was absent in the West but flourished in the East, especially after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, There are also issues concerning women’s rights and human rights, which the West advanced while the East regressed, The reasons for rejection and hostility towards the West a century ago are no different than they are today, anything .

The success of a concept is not only related to its abstract quality, but also to the form of its applications, The form of the applications is related to the party to which they are applied,The applications of European nationalist thought were in the hands of peoples more developed than the peoples of the East, In addition, European nationalist thought was a popular thought, while in the East it was an elitist thought, In Europe, there was no possibility of confusion from religious concepts, while confusion in the East was, and still is, at its maximum strength.

It is not true that the death of Arab nationalist thought was premature, for every thought has a role to play, and then another thought comes to replace it, This mechanism is not rooted in the atmosphere of Arab sanctities, Sanctities do not like new situations and even new people, The image that Arab presidents and leaders have presented and continue to present is very expressive of the Arab intellectual and behavioral situation, As long as the leader or president is still alive, there is no need for a new president or leader, and even the clinical death of the president does not exempt him from the tasks of serving the beloved homeland, Some presidents, like Bouteflika, carried out their tasks in serving the dear homeland even from their graves