Arab nationalism (Arabic: القومية العربية, romanized: al-qawmīya al-ʿarabīya) is a political ideology asserting that Arabs constitute a single nation. As a traditional nationalist ideology, it promotes Arab culture and civilization, celebrates Arab history, the Arabic language and Arabic literature. It often also calls for unification of Arab society. It bases itself on the premise that the people of the Arab world—from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea—constitute one nation bound together by a common identity — ethnicity, language, culture, history, geography, and politics.
Rooted in the 19th-century Nahda under Ottoman rule, Arab nationalism emerged in the early 20th century as an opposition movement in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, later evolving into the overwhelmingly dominant ideological force in the Arab world. Initially focused on resisting Ottoman control, it later opposed Western imperialism after World War I due to the undesirable outcome of the Arab Revolt — in successfully achieving their primary goal of dissolving the Ottoman Empire, the Arab rebels simultaneously enabled the partitioning of their would-be unified Arab state by Britain and France. Anti-Western sentiment grew as Arab nationalists rallied around the Palestinian cause, viewing Zionism as a threat to the region's integrity and linking the Arab–Israeli conflict to Western imperialism due to the Balfour Declaration. Arab unity was considered a necessary instrument to "restoring this lost part" of the nation, which in turn meant eliminating the "relics" of foreign colonialism. Its influence steadily expanded over subsequent years. By the 1950s and 1960s, the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser championed Arab nationalism following his seizure and nationalization of the Suez Canal and his "victory" over British–French–Israeli forces in the 1956 Suez Crisis, and political parties like the Ba'ath Party and the Arab Nationalist Movement demonstrated remarkable capabilities for mobilization, organization, and clandestine activities. This ideology seemed to be on the rise across the Arab states, with independent Arab governments such as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt adopting Arab nationalism as official state policy.
