The Arabness of Middle East regionalism: the Arab Spring and competition for discursive hegemony between Egypt, Iran and Turkey

Abstract

The Middle East is often considered to demonstrate a case of weak regionalism. This article suggests that the continued prevalence of Arab identity as the hegemonic component of regional consciousness contributes to this. The dominance of a discourse of ‘Arabness’ reduces the region's flexibility to adapt and develop regional institutions in several ways and particularly vis-a-vis the non-Arab communities and states that are found within the spatial boundaries of the Middle East. To explore the role played by Arab identity politics in regionalism with regard to the status of non-Arab states, this article presents a study of the competing hegemonic regional discourses employed by Turkey, Iran and Egypt during a two-year period following the 2011 uprising in Egypt. This analysis suggests that even during a time of crisis, non-Arab states face obstacles to their assertion of regional projects and that Arabness is a central factor in the narratives resisting alternative interpretations of the interests and definition of the Middle East as a region. The article concludes that Arabness forms the hegemonic discourse that shapes the international relations of the Middle East.

Keywords:

• Arab politics
• regionalism
• Arab Spring
• Arabism
• Middle East
• regional identity

Funding

The author's research for this article was supported by the large-scale integrated FP7 project, Global Reordering: Evolution of European Networks (GR:EEN). European Commission Project Number: 266809. It was also supported by the Regional Powers Programme at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg.

Notes

1 I use the term Arab Spring in this article to refer to a moment of revolt that introduced diverse uprisings and led to a series of heterogenous transition periods affecting the politics of the entire region in multiple ways.

2 Although outside the main period of analysis of Egyptian political communications, the period after the fall of Morsi does seem to indicate a more negative view of Turkey has been adopted. For example, Egyptian media carried unprecedentedly negative coverage of the anniversary of the Armenian genocide (Mustafa 2014, Abdul Fattah 2014).