ABSTRACT
In 1999, the explicitly titled The Swansong of Arabism announced the death of political Arabism, which the book’s author, Lebanese journalist Hazem Saghieh, had claimed had drawn its last breath with the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein (14). Saghieh established a link between Arabism and its ideological negation of the nation-state with the nation-state’s excess of power at the expense of civil (judicial, educational, medical) functions. He noted, moreover, that pan-Arab one-upmanship had pushed ideologically weak traditional regimes to appropriate the doctrine in order to enhance their power (Saghieh 1999, 39). Yet Saghieh also observed a new tendency for states to give priority to national culture and media rather than to panArab cultural productions. This was particularly the case in the fields of literature, the press or music, where, for example, a prevalence of songs in dialectal Arabic reflected the new emphasis on local identity. This development contrasted with the ideological domination of Arab nationalism in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. Saghieh also emphasised that Egypt had lost its cultural centrality at all levels – in music, cinema and literature.
