Amidst the strategic changes the wider Middle East is undergoing (that the first article of this series presented) many in the region question whether, politically, there is one or several Arab worlds.

Two factors underscore the question.

One — North Africa, the Arab parts of the Nile valley, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula, all now have vastly different economic and social circumstances. This is not new in itself; for decades these socioeconomic circumstances have created a colossal gap in wealth and life standards in between Arab societies. But the gap has, in the past two decades, become so large that perspectives about the present and prospects for the future have also become vastly different. Perspectives about the present mean how large sections of the populations see the drivers affecting their lives now; prospects abut the future concern the factors that will shape what is coming for these societies. These perspectives of and prospects for the societies in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and North Africa, have become not only different because of levels of national and individual incomes, but also because the gap has widened so much in these past two decades that these societies have been moving in different directions.

Large sections of Arab societies, largely but not only in the Arabian Peninsula, have bright prospects for the future, anchored on expectations of high standards of living by any international measure, good education for young generations, sophisticated and reliable healthcare systems, quite good financial connections to the most economically and technologically advanced societies in the world, all leading to better human development prospects. But much larger segments of Arab societies, largely in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, let alone in the farthest regions of Arab speaking societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, face futures that could well entail more difficulties in standards of living, acute challenges in providing education that would lead to sustainable jobs in the future, pressures on already struggling healthcare systems, and frayed connections to the most advanced centres of technology and wealth-creation in the world. Realistic expectations indicate that these societies will likely struggle to sustain their current levels of human development, if not face worsening conditions. And so, the wider socioeconomic and human development gaps become, the less concrete connections between Arab societies would be.

Two — International positioning has also differed amongst Arab countries. On the surface, Arab countries have varying degrees of political alliances with different powers in the world and the region. But the varying degrees are inherently differences not merely of scale but of nature. This means that not only political preferences and short term objectives differ in between Arab countries, but also that there exist amongst Arab countries different visions about how the wider Middle East ought to look like in the future. And so, not only are Arab societies moving in different directions in terms of socioeconomics and human development, but are also backing different futures for the region.

But two other factors point to a different conclusion, to a view that, politically, there is indeed a single Arab world.

The first is that all Arab countries are on the receiving end of the determinants shaping the future of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula. This is not only a function of economic and technological dependence on (largely) the western world, but also the result of widening gaps between the Arabs and most of their neighbours in the most important manifestations of power. This situation is an incentive for the most important Arab countries to come together because, in any serious strategic assessment, this coming together enhances their collective bargaining power and strengthen their posture at a time the region’s immediate future is being reformed, with major consequences on all of them.

The second is that there remains a single understanding of Arabness as a cultural identity. This is interesting, for the successive failures of Arab nationalism in the period since the mid 1960s could have led to the emergence of different, opposing understandings of what the Arab identity means and comprises. That this has not happened during a half century in which the Arab world doubled its population means that there exists now over 400 million people, the vast majority of them consider themselves Arabs according to, more or less, the same political and cultural frameworks. This is a wide bedrock upon which political projects, that have learnt from the past decades, could be built.

Whether Arab societies would prove, in the coming decade or two, that they indeed form a single political world or would move irrevocably towards different futures, their neighbours will not wait for them. There exist now in the Middle East, several competing political projects aiming to shape the future of the region, as the next article of this series will discuss.