The State of the Union

UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC CFG-60'58 AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 522 FIFTH AV%"IUE NEW WRK 36.NY. TEB STATE OF THE UNION The publication in these pages is one of a Observations on the Beginnings continuing series from AMERICAN UNI- of the United Arab Republic VERSITIES FIELD STAFF correspondents on current developments in world affairs. A Letter fron Charles F. Gallagher This correspondence is distributed by the AUFS as a contribution to the American fund of information on significant foreign Beirut events, trends, and personalities. The in- bby 30, 1958 fornral letters, reflecting the current judg- wents of men on the scene, are of primary interest to the universities and colleges Cairo was baked in a blistering heat and covered with dust for the return of President Gamal a hich co-operative1 y sponsor the AUFS, a nonprofit corporation. Abdel Nasser from his eighteen-day trip to the Soviet- - The letters are available by arrange- Union. From early morning van loads of delta fellahin ment to other educational institutions, swarmed into the festively-arrayed capital and lined the avenues leading from Liberation Square through business and publishing firms, and public the handsome modern suburbs of Heliopolis, which in- affairs groups interested in the findings of clude the President's om modest, two-storied, green- exceptionally qualified correspondents. The shuttered villa, to the nilitary airport at Al btazah, writers have been chosen for their ability where the official welcome-home was held. to use scllolarly as well as journalistic skills in collecting, reporting, and evalu- ill1 along the highway the attractive but ating data. Each 11as resided in his area of mnotonously identical buntin? was interspersed with assignment long enough to be thoroughly at slogans and exhortations in Arabic, hung in streamers home in it, and has combined personal ob- across the road. My seat-coxpanion in one of the servation and experience with advanced Volkswagen minibuses being used to transport the studies. journalists invited to the ceremonies turned out to The letters are copyrighted and must be, after inquiries, Chinese and not Japanese; he was not be reproduced or republished in whole the correspondent of the New China News Agency. After or in part, or given secondary distribution, he had unsuccessfully engaged the driver to learn except by arrangement with the A IT F S. the meaning of some of the signs overhead I ventured Faculty members of colleges and univer- a few translations for him, which he assiduously sities receiving the AUFS services are priv- wrote down in English and Chinese, while he noted on ileged to use the letters in classroom work, the side that it was a "folk celebration." I thought and students of these institutions may draw momentarily of the complications that might ensue if on the material in them for academic papers I mistranslated a bit, but honesty prevailed. And, not planned for publication. in any case, I reflected, as he jotted down "Peace be Letters an d reports issued by th e with you, man of the people," the f'salgm alaikum" of AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES FIELDSTAFF the Arabic, the peace of God, would -not really have are not selected to accord with mt editorial the same meaning when it appeared in Peking news- policy and do not represent the uiews of its papers. Nevertheless, we did represent for a few membership. Responsibility for accuracy of moments, as do the juxtaposition on Cairo news kiosks facts and for opinions expressed in the of -~ime- and New Times, b~demoiselleand Women of letters and reports rests solely with the China, of the maceful coexistence which the -' -mrt individual correspondents. President's visit to Moscow was officially intended to encourage. PI~ILLIPSTALBOT EXECUTIVE I~IRECTOR For the return of the President, Cairo had turned out an impressive greeting which was as spontaneous as it was organized. It was a Friday afternoon, everyone was off work, and no one objec- ted to endwing a colorful parade. It had what Egyptians themselves described to me as typical Egyptian reserve, huwever. The crowds were on the whole from three- to five-deep along most of the route, but there were empty patches. The applause was certainly more than polite; it was warm and it occasionally became vociferous, although a good deal of it seemed directed as much to us in the press cars, or anyone in the cortege who happened to be reflecting in the glory. There was perhaps even a certain pride in the adultness of attitude; for Egyptians were quick to point out that they could never give anyone, even Abdel Naseer, the kind of frenetic, almost obsessive reception which the Egyptian President got on his visit to Damascus in February at the time of union with Syria. Much of the really excited behavior came from some of the official personages invited to sit on glided chairs under a great awning at the airport and to eat sweet pastries to the accompaniment of iced lemonade while waiting the presidential arrival. It was somewhat surprising to hear men, standing on chairs reserved for government offi- cials, give way to their enthusiasm as the Presi- dent moved along the official and diplomatic waiting line to shake hands, by crying out, in the kind of cry that you would very much doubt ever got yourself, "Aish live Gamal, -apos- hab'i:b ash sha*bw .nna the least interesting feature of the attendance was the complete turnout of foreign diplomats. Once before, on Nasserts return from the Brioni confer- ence with Nehru and Tito in July, 1956, the Western ambassadors had failed to put in an appearance, theoretically by oversight. Positive neutrality has corn a long way since then. Internally, of course, every important government official was on hand, and as function- aries and diplomats chatted amiably in small clus- ters before the touch-down of the special Russian plane with its MIC escort, one of them stood out because of the dignified solitude in which he sat in the first raw, vacant seats on either side. It was Afif a1 Bizri, the ex-Conrmander in Chief of the Syrian Arqy and one of the key prombters of the Syro-Egyptian union, now living in Cairo. His severe dark-blue double-breasted suit and his quiet demeanor seemed to have little to do with his past military role. Was it a coincidence that no one happened to turn up beside him and sit, or was he really too warm to handle at the moment? In the answer to that question lies much of the story behind the formation of the United Arab Republic. It has been rightly said of the Arabs that their principal goal, from which they have little deviated in the past half century despite so many unfavorable factors, internal and foreign, has been to become the citizens of a modern, united, and respected Arab state. Translated simply, the goals break down into independence, unity, and progress. There has never been any fixed, irrevocable order to these three primary aims, but their precedence in the order listed above has been under- stood by most Arab leaders; without freedom from foreign control there could be no unity, and without unity on a regional scale they feel, as do many thinking leaders nowadays, that technical progress is impossible in an increasingly competitive world. Now that independence has been achieved throughout the Arab world, during the period ranging from the early 1920fs to the mid-l950's, with the major exception of Algeria, and the minor exceptions of the assorted protectorates and treaty-dominated sheikhdoms on the fringe of the Arabian peninsula, it is inevitable that the longings for the second goal, unity, are tending to become the new point of fixation. Western understanding of the Arabsf hunger for unity is often ob- scured by a tendency to see the various Arab countries as counterparts of European states -- highly developed state-organisms having existed as political, social, and intellectual units for in many cases four to five centuries or more. This view is compounded by the fact that most Westerners in their life- time, since World War I, have grown accustomed to thinking of the existing Arab national divisions, from Iraq to Morocco, as areas on the world rnap which have always been there in approximately the present form, and as standing for quite separate individualistic entities. But a country like Iraq, for example, had no conscious, cohesive existence of any kind before 1918. And while there are formidable differences of race, culture, and even language within the Arab world, and although there are large sub-area groupings, such as the Arab Mid- dle East and Arab North Africa, which are significantly disparate, the key is still unity rather than diversity. The net result of the tendency to apply European norms to the culture of another area is to distort reality. Apart from certain specific nationalisms which have long had, and still have, strong permanent roots among their peoples, notably in the case of Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, it is not rash to say that most Arabs have little patriotic feeling for their own country as opposed to their generalized pan- Arab sentiments. This is a phenomenon to be observed from Algeria to Jordan, but perhaps nowhere is it more strong than in the states of the Levant: Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, and, especially in the "beating heart" of Arabism, Syria. Historically and geographically Syria is a superb example of the artificiality of the postwar Arab states and, partly out of reaction to that condition, of the psychologically pressing need for integration into a larger, more rational, and more secure body.

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