ABSTRACT
The fact that the vast majority of newly independent states contained largely Arabic-speaking populations and that they consciously identified themselves as Arab has been a significant feature of twentieth-century Middle Eastern politics. Nevertheless, for many years attempts to try to define this role and to work out whether the practice of intra-Arab state relations differs markedly from that between other groups of states in, say, Latin America or East Asia, did not prove markedly successful. For one thing, much of the writing on the subject has always been highly political and concerned to make polemical rather than academic points. Perhaps because of this, few writers took much care to distinguish between the various types of Arabism which have run all the way from a sense of shared history, culture and, sometimes, religion to the creation of parties and movements that have placed Arab nationalism and Arab unity at the centre of their programmes of political action. There was a similar disinclination to distinguish between the different types of national solidarities to be found among the Arabs; for example, the strong sense of local identification to be found among Egyptians or Moroccans, or the several kinds of Palestinianism that developed among Palestinians with quite separate experiences of occupation, exile or foreign rule.
