ABSTRACT
The contrast is there, clear, rarely disputed and quite depressing. On the one hand the hundreds of thousands of Arabs applauding Nasser or mourning him. On the other, the droning and boring 'activity' of the Arab League of States, the institution created to embody 'the Arab idea'. What does the inelegant building on Khaireddine Pacha street in Tunis have in common with the feverishly militant 'uruba of the fifties, or with the ideal of Arab unity? The Egyptian Rayyis of yesteryear and today's Arab bureaucrat might share a few pieces of vocabulary, a reference to some dusty past, or a common anti-Western discourse. The words might be the same, the spirit could not be. The times, the places, the individuals, the tempo, everything looks different. Who could have thought that the League could be displaced from its Cairo building, symbolically located between the Egyptian Foreign Ministry palace and the popular Midan at-Tahrir? Who could have thought, only a decade ago, of a Tunis-based Arab League, in the very country which had once taken the extraordinary step of freezing its membership in the League, and which had opposed so thoroughly the Nasserist brand of Arab nationalism?
