Re-Orienting Rivers of Rivalry: Supranationalism in the Middle-East

The nation-state system was transported to the Middle-East in the aftermath of WWI and
decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. The state came as an "imported commodity, partly under
colonial pressure and partly under the influence of imitation and mimicry" (Ayubi,1995). The need
to legitimize the nation-state led to strong nation- and state-building processes (Spruyt, 2002), yet
the outcome has largely been a system of mutually antagonistic states.
Region building has suffered from much of the same deficits as nation-states, leading to high levels
of inter-state conflict. While the region has millennium-old cultural, religious and linguistic ties,
its regional cooperation bodies - the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council - remain
impotent and incapable of mitigating these issues. One main reason could be traced to the state
system, as these regional bodies are designed as "institutional anchors, ensuring the persistence of
sovereignty for member states" (Al-Ahram and Lust, 2016).
Literature explains regionalism in the Middle-East in terms of how these institutions are "designed
to fail" (see Aarts, 1999; Kuhnhardt, 2004; Fawcett 2005). The reason for this could be that they
engage in vicious circles reiterating national interests that do not seek solutions to common
problems, but rather mere compromises. Echoing Jean Monnet's critique of intergovernmental
organizations, the compromise reached in these types of institutions is the "weakest common
denominator [and therefore] ... incapable of laying national antagonism to rest" (Grin, 2017).