The Arab world’s experience with modernity is slightly over two hundred years old. Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign on Egypt, which ended in failure at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, had shocked the country, and behind her most of the urban parts of the Arab world. The peoples of the region came to see the colossal gap in the sources of power - science and technology - that separated them from Europe. And those who had followed events carefully understood that the failure of the French campaign was not the result of Egyptian resistance, but largely because of Britain’s insistence that Egypt, with its immense strategic importance, would not become a French colony. Egyptians, and behind them the rest of the peoples of the region, were largely observers with hardly any serious capabilities to shape their own future.

Realisation of weakness give rise to Mohamed Ali’s project, arguably the most ambitious developmental project Egypt, and the entire Arab world, have witnessed in the past two centuries. For three decades, between 1810 to 1840, Mohamed Ali and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, and a large group of engineers, scientists, doctors, military strategists, and administrators, largely European, but that with time came to include a sizeable cadre of Egyptians, overhauled Egypt’s economy, and subtly with that, life in the country. Mohamed Ali’s project took Egypt from medieval darkness and ushered it into the modern age. By the mid nineteenth century, living conditions in the urban parts of Cairo and Alexandria and in the rich parts of the Nile Delta were comparable to those in similar places in southern Europe. Mohamed Ali’s and Ibrahim’s ambitions went further. For a decade, in the 1830s, Egypt was the base of a budding empire that encompassed the whole of the Levant and that came close to overtaking the seat of the Ottoman Empire itself.

Geopolitics put an end to Egyptian expansion. Britain, and with it the key European countries at the time, decided to check Mohamed Ali’s power. Egypt’s eastern Mediterranean empire fell, and with the passage of time, many of the generators of power that had been established in Egypt were lost amidst weak leadership and mismanagement.

It was again in Egypt, in the second half of the nineteenth century, that the Arab world witnessed its second major developmental project. Ismail Pasha, a grandson of Mohamed Ali, and a son of Ibrahim pasha, sought to create through urban and industrial development what his grandfather and father had attempted through military might. In a decade Ismail transformed Cairo and Alexandria to resemble parts of Paris and Vienna. Ismail’s project aimed to develop the Egyptian economy from being one of the world’s most important cotton exporters into an integral node in the world’s key industrial and trading value chains at the time. The winds were in his sails for several years. But ambition gave rise to hubris, and confidence descended into arrogance, at the exact time that world economic conditions were creating headwinds facing his project. Egyptian debt ballooned and burdens mounted on the Egyptian treasury. Ruin followed, and in its wake came humiliation and Egypt’s loss of economic and effectively political independence. Less than a decade later, in the early 1880s, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa and the Levant were falling under direct British and French occupation.

About a half century later, the Hashemites of the Hijaz, believed that Britain, at the time the world’s primary imperial power, would reward them for rebelling against the Ottomans and siding with her against Turkey in the First World War, by granting them an independent Arab kingdom. The Hashemites aspired to create a united Arab state that would encompass the entire Levant. The ambition was not merely political; echoes of what Ismail had created in Egypt fuelled the imagination of several Hashemite princes, and so parts of the Levant, especially those that had never witnessed any significant modernisation before, saw serious advancements in infrastructure and transportation and the provisioning of basic services. Yet again, most of these ambitions ended up bitter memories. Naïveté and lack of real preparation blurred. Neither a united Arab state materialised, nor real independence was achieved.

The Arab liberal experiment, anchored in Egypt, in the period between the two world wars was a moment of true potential. Political freedom, real representation, serious checks and balances on the executive, and genuine advancements in human rights, at a time of an impressive cultural effervescence in Egypt that was closely followed by the entire Arab world, flared up ambitions for effecting a real developmental breakthrough in the Arab world. But the liberal experiment proved fleeting; its foundations were quickly eroded by the demands and realities of the Second World War. By the late 1940s, little substance was left from that experiment. Importantly, its values and meanings did not have enough time to be established in Arab socio-politics.

Gamal Abdel Nasser championed, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Arabs’ most popular political project in modern times. Strong will, determination to achieve independence, global conditions after the Second World War, and the changes that had taken place in Egypt after the fall of the Egyptian monarchy at the hand of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his movement, put an end to European colonialism in the Arab world. The 1956 Suez War, in which Nasser’s Egypt had politically defeated colonialism, became a turning point across the Arab world, if not globally. Suez made it seem possible that the Arab world (and actually the entire global south) could summon its will, defeat its former masters, and that it had the opportunity to emerge as a sizeable power determining its own future. The Nasserite project gave rise to a new Arab collective consciousness that absorbed and in turn gave momentum to a tantalising mix of developmental advancements along with an assertive geopolitical positioning. There were real achievements in the decade after Suez. But as the project came to be tested, whether militarily in the 1967 war or in several developmental aspects, its shortcomings and often acute weaknesses became glaring. In the final reckoning, the will and discipline and talents that led the project proved far from commensurate with the grand ambitions that were entailed in it.

The decades from the mid 1970s to the Arab uprisings in 2011 were largely vacuous. There were notable developments in infrastructure, some economic reforms, and in the Arabian Peninsula, where oil and gas revenues were fuelling development, there were major, and often impressive, advancements not just in the look and feel of some cities, but in mindsets and ways of managing the countries in the region. And yet, the vast majority of the Arab world in these decades lacked any real socio-political project that could inspire its peoples. This vacuum in the imagination was taking place as the Arab world was, in that period, almost doubling its population. Economics exacerbated the situation. Economic reforms programmes in the period from the 1980s to the first decade of the twenty first century often resulted in fiscal improvements and monetary stabilisations. But the cost was rising poverty and inequality, often to shocking levels that were reminiscent of conditions in the Arab world during the feudal times of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As previously presented in this series, the Arab uprisings at the beginning of the second decade of this century were the flowering of major ambitions and the eruption of immense anger. The experience of most parts of the Arab world in the past fifteen years have shattered the ambitions, and for many, have turned anger into resignation.

And so, the story of the Arab world’s key developmental projects and moments of rising potential in the past two hundred years seem devoid of major, sustained successes. There were many significant achievements. There were moments that continue, decades later, to inspire and imbue the soul with joy and pride. And there is an accumulated history, a lot of it is stacked with learnings and what has enriched the Arab psyche. And yet there is a painful realisation that the trajectory of Arab development in the past two hundred years had achieved by far less than what seemed possible, or even expected, at the heights of the different developmental projects the region had undergone. It is not a surprise that the collective Arab psyche, particularly amongst the largest sections of the youths, is disengaged from its environment and its history.

As the next article in this series will show, today the developmental trajectories of the Arab world are diverging, posing serious questions concerning the notion of an Arab world.