When we look at the Middle East, we see that Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, the Baathist ideology, is in a shambles. It’s no longer possible for all Arabs to unify around this ideology and put up opposition to today’s global assaults. The Baathist ideology isn’t just an ideology on the theoretical level, it’s an ideology that had been in active power for roughly the last quarter of the 20th century. In this case, whether it’s the Arab nationalism and Arab socialism of Jamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Michel Aflaq’s Baathist ideology applied in Syria and Iraq or the nationalism formulated by Christian Arabs in Lebanon, none of these are able to make their presence felt today.In order to find the correct answer to the question of whether nationalism is on the rise in actuality or whether it is something else that is increasing, it’s necessary to take a look at both external and internal factors at play.
Everyone accepts that globalization is moving onto the scene like a tidal wave and one by one dissolving structures that had been in place since the beginning of the last century. Classical economic structures are being eliminated. The government has turned to privatization policies. This is a policy that globalization has brought into the picture and imposed.
There are still problems like overpopulation in cities, and this results in an employment problem. Foreign capital is flowing in, and the capital in circulation knows no bounds. Foreign capital brings along with it its own rules. When it brings in these new rules along with its arrival, it dissolves the internal economic conventions. What we refer to as globalization changes everything for people in terms of culture -- their likes, tastes, ways of sitting, everything. It transforms their traditional lifestyles, for people are forced to open a market for themselves and find consumers. And when this happens, structures formed at a national level are dissolved, and, paradoxically, globalization emphasizes the local and the regional as alternatives.
This may initially seem appealing, or at the very least seem like an inevitable or innocent process, but globalization is so ideological in its nature that it voids that which is local and regional, bringing it to a meta state, using effective instruments to turn them into the mere components of a market. Whether we like it or not, this results in the dissolution of what is national.
There’s no large-scale opposition to this wave of globalization; there’s only opposition on the level of discourse, nothing in terms of action. Nation-states are being shaken right now. With the European Union project, Europe is trying to overcome the concussion the nation-state has suffered from globalization and defeat the crisis. It is trying to contain the damage to an acceptable and recoverable level.
Internal reaction as a nationalist reaction is being formulated in the face of developments in northern Iraq, the clear role of the US and Israel in northern Iraq and the fact that new Turkish policies have emerged that fall outside the nation’s “traditional” policies and national interest. When examined closely and carefully, in reality people are upset at America, the West and Israel, and at Kurds comprising an entity in northern Iraq, and in connection with this, they are worried that Turkey will be divvied up.
These emerging reactions are identified as nationalism, but what is on the rise is another matter. Unemployed and hopeless youth living around big cities are just barely able to scrape by within the unregistered economy; a destitute urban population is emerging who are perhaps able to find minimum wage jobs, who are trying to make ends meet but aren’t able to. This subset of the population also has a reaction. They used to voice their reactions at the soccer stadiums; now they’re taking that opposition to the city centers. Nationalism is being re-established as a candidate for the ideology of these enraged masses, as an aggressive, quarrelsome discourse. A new class of city dwellers, a new urban population rife with violence is on the way. This has nothing to do with the political and cultural nationalism that we’re used to; this is something else.
