Pan-Arabism is the political ideology holding that the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East and North Africa constitute a single Arab nation (umma) that was artificially divided by European colonialism and should be politically unified. It emerged as a significant force in the early twentieth century, drawing on Romantic nationalist thought as well as the experience of Ottoman collapse and European colonial partition. Pan-Arabism’s high point came in the 1950s and 1960s under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arab charisma attracted mass followings across the Arab world. The Ba’ath Party was one of pan-Arabism’s primary institutional vehicles. The United Arab Republic of Syria and Egypt (1958–61) was pan-Arabism’s most ambitious practical experiment; its failure was a significant blow to the pan-Arab project’s credibility. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in which Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in six days, was widely understood as the definitive military refutation of pan-Arabist pretensions. Pan-Arabism as a mass mobilising ideology declined sharply after 1967, replaced in many contexts by political Islam as the primary oppositional discourse.
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