Egypt’s Crisis Signals the Unraveling of Yet Another Arab Nation-State
When British and French diplomats sat down to draw the boundaries of the modern Middle East, one country required no ruler and compass to define it. People lived in Egypt 10,000 years before the birth of Christ. The specific civilization that left behind the Giza pyramids dates to 2,700 years BC, and a sense of nationhood was embedded so deeply along the shores of the Nile that the quip of an Egyptian diplomat would become a trusim: “Egypt is the only nation-state in the Arab world,” Tahseen Bashir famously said. “The rest are just tribes with flags.”
So if the Land of the Pharaohs is being rent asunder by the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring, what hope is there for countries still in the gestational stage of statehood? Not ten years ago in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, one of the issues facing then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh was how to deal with a sheik who had drawn a gun on a traffic cop who had the temerity to stand in an intersection and halt his car, so that traffic could pass from the cross street. The writ of the central government not only had not reached the rugged mountains to the north of the capital; some from the mountains failed to recognize it in the capital itself.
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It’s not an uncommon view. Across the chasm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the same assessment is heard from Mohammad Shtayyh, a onetime peace negotiator and senior official in the secular Fatah faction that governs the West Bank. The view from his Ramallah office offers no comfort. “There is a de-facto partition of Libya, on tribal lines,” Shtayyh begins. “There is a de-facto partition of Iraq, on sectarian and nationalist lines. The most serious thing Syria faces is partition. There is a de-facto partition in Lebanon. Palestine is divided between Gaza and the West Bank.
“There is a total fragmentation of the region,” Shtayyh tells TIME. “There is a total collapse of the nation state into tribal regions, and in some regions by sectarian control. The intent is fragmentation.”
Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/07/02/egypts-crisis-signals-the-unraveling-of-yet-another-arab-nation-state/#ixzz2XvDZAixq
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