Amin, Samir. The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggles. (New York: Zed Books, 1978)
The Arab Nation (1976), offers a unique Cold War era perspective from a committed Marxist and Arab nationalist exploring the reasons why the Arab world did not develop a capitalist market on its own, and postulating several possible Arab futures, some of them uncannily prescient. After a brief history of “the Arab Nation,” focused primarily on North Africa and the Palestinians, Amin argues that there are several possible outcomes of the aftermath of the 1973 conflict. His first possibility is “a neo-colonial order and Arab disunity” characterized by continued developmental dependency of the oil producing countries on the major global superpowers and a tendency of these countries to invest more abroad than in their own poor classes. Accordingly, “[t]hanks to the disunity of the Arab world, no solution would be found to the Palestinian problem … Southern Arabia, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt are the misfits in this possible income.”[1] Amin insists that Egypt is the key to social and socialist transformation. His other, more hopeful possible outcomes, each of which involves the collapsing of national borders, vigorous reinvestment in local economies and impoverished classes, and the rise of a powerful, functional (non-U.S.S.R. affiliated) socialist movement, are clearly obsolete dreams now. Nevertheless, they are an important insight into the shifts in geo-political alignments that Arab intellectuals investigated and navigated in the second half of the twentieth century.
[1] 104.
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