It is worth noting in passing how starkly this contrasts with the multiplicity of fora for voice and decision regarding issues of political identity in Western democracies. Articulation and consideration of native people’s claims for recognition of their identities and associated rights have proceeded in much of the New World through a wide range of organizations and institutions. By so doing they have contributed to the shift from mono- to multicultural national identities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere. In part it is the institutions of these pluralist democracies that have made this possible, but it is also due in part to their political traditions. European democracies, with similar, although more centralized institutional structures, lacking traditions of assimilation of migrants and celebrating comparatively unified, coherent national identities rooted in language, ethnicity, and partially in religion, are encountering much greater difficulties in redefining their national identities to take account of their increasingly heterogeneous populations.

By comparison to the New World and European models, Egypt lacks both the institutional infrastructure and the traditions that facilitate this process, so the path away from an increasingly inappropriate, monolithic Islamicized Egyptian Arabism is far from clear. Neither really wanting or knowing how to address the identity issue, those running the Egyptian state have taken the position that even the suggestion of separate identities is heresy, a view which accords with that expressed by much of the secular left, but which offends many Christians and Saidis, inflames Islamists, and annoys the “international capitalists,” who are seeking to emphasize global similarities, not national distinctiveness. But the tradition of Egyptian unity, which as far as identity is concerned may be no older than the rise of modern nationalism with its culmination in independence in the 1950s, is not conducive to a process whereby identity is continually altered through its articulation, examination, and conversion into public policy outcomes within inclusive, pluralistic institutions.

A third option to square the circle between a political identity founded on a unitarian conception of the nation and a population divided by deepening cleavages, would be to embark on an effort to intensify the centrality and clarity of the political identity, presumably in some sort of neo-fascist, corporatist mold, possibly led by a military junta, or, were an Islamist elite to come to power, through a transnationalist, Islamist framework. Since the intensification option is not really available to the incumbent, pragmatic elite, nor is it likely that a neo-fascist clique of officers or vanguard of an Islamist revolution will take power, the circle is not likely to be squared in this fashion.

Globalizing Unity

The final reality that contributes to the widening gap between the “officially” endorsed and propagated national identity and what people actually believe, is globalization in its various forms. Just as Egypt and most of its Arab neighbors have been among the “also rans” in the race to enter global markets and climb up the production ladder in pursuit of higher value added manufacturing, so, too, have they lagged behind much of Asia and Latin America in coming to believe in the primacy of economics over politics, export-oriented growth over import substitution, private over public ownership, and openness to the outside world rather than protection of local manufacturers and markets, customs, and traditions. The continued, rather defensive celebration of Egypt’s Arab and Islamic identity results not only from a regime seeking to legitimate itself; it bespeaks also of a nation that is at least subliminally aware that it has reached a crossroads, but is not yet sure which way to go.

In its indecisiveness Egypt is not alone, for that indecisiveness is a product of globalization itself. Growing distinctiveness of subgroup identities, probably an inevitable consequence of the receding salience of imperialism and colonialism, is further exacerbated by the differential impacts of globalization on the various social formations that comprise the nation. Those who “win” from global and national economic structural adjustment, whether nations, social formations, or individuals, tend to participate in, support, and identify with the processes of globalization. Losers, on the other hand, excluded from the benefits of global and national structural adjustments, resent globalization and seek identities that emphasize differences, whether regional, national, religious, ethnic, or linguistic. Benjamin Barber pinned the pop labels of “McWorld” on winners and “Jihad” on the losers, labels that capture the essence of the urge to homogenize, on the one hand, versus that to differentiate, on the other.

At the global level the successful developmental states of Asia might be thought of as exemplars of McWorld, while most of those in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as proponents of Jihad. Only the city states of the Persian Gulf seem to have openly embraced most aspects of globalization and among them, only Dubai, United Arab Emirates, can be pointed to as a cosmopolitan city-state in which the business of politics is business, conducted largely in English and almost invariably international in character. But Dubai is the exception and Egypt the rule. In Cairo, as in almost all other Arab primate cities, most of those who comprise the “chattering classes”—maybe a more accurate and certainly a more modest term than “intellectuals”—are closer to the Jihad than the McWorld end of the globalization continuum. The bulk of writings in the Cairo popular press on the impact of globalization on Egypt, for example, emphasize the negative economic, social, and political impacts. Even Arabic is deemed to be under threat from English, the lingua franca of globalization.

Similarly, when in the wake of the signing of Oslo I in September 1993 various American policy makers and Middle East specialists, backed up by the prestige of their governmental rank or the reputation of the think tanks with which they were associated, proclaimed the birth of a “New Middle East” and the death of the old “Arab world,” many Egyptian intellectuals were aghast. Unwilling to shed their Arab identity that quickly, especially because it would seem to be in response to demands from those associated with Israel, they recoiled. Despite the threat implicit in the phrase that “history was going to leave the Arabs behind” unless they jumped onto the New Middle East bandwagon, Egyptian intellectuals overwhelmingly rejected the appeal to subordinate the issues of identity and national integrity and security to those of Western-endorsed efforts to develop, democratize, and normalize.