It wasn’t the Axis’s invasion of their ancestral homeland that concerned these Bedouins, however, but rather their mistreatment by their own government. With the outbreak of the war, they had been thrown into a prison reserved for foreign subjects, and their families were suffering gravely in their absence. Accordingly, they demanded an explanation for why they were being punished as if they were strangers in their own native land.

“We are your subjects,” the Bedouins contended, “and if the government does not want us to be its subjects, we implore you to let us know the name of a state we can join in order to request compensation for our families.” They concluded the petition on a similar note of sarcasm: “We truly believe that we do not belong to the Egyptian government; for, if we did belong to it, adhering to its laws [as we do], it would not subject us to [such] treatment as foreigners.”

Why did the Egyptian government view its own desert-dwelling Bedouin population with such suspicion and contempt? After all, shouldn’t the native inhabitants of Egypt’s desert domains, which comprise roughly 90 percent of the country’s land surface, have counted as being just as Egyptian as inhabitants of Cairo or the Nile Valley?

The answer to these questions lies in the complex history of Egypt’s formation as a modern territorial nation-state.

Nations must never be taken for granted. They do not exist from time immemorial as naturally bounded and cohesive social units, but rather are actively made (and often re-made) to serve particular political projects in particular places at particular times. Even Egypt—ostensibly one of the most ancient political civilizations on the planet—underwent dramatic transformations in the late 19th and 20th centuries before it emerged as a modern nation-state like the one we know today.

One such transformation involved the projection of a unified territorial identity from the center of power (Cairo) into the furthest reaches of the state’s sovereign domains, including the Western Desert. While other nation-states underwent similar transformations, the Egyptian case contained some particular elements that would turn out to be consequential for the country’s region and its history.

My own interest in the territorial dimension of Egyptian nationhood began nearly a decade ago, on a 10-hour bus journey across Egypt’s Western Desert to the remote oasis of Siwa. As I stared out my window at the endless barren expanses, I began to wonder how all of this beautiful wasteland became part of Egypt in the first place. My sense of bewilderment only grew when I arrived in Siwa, which lies only 30 miles from the Libyan border and has an ethnically distinct population that more resembles that of some Libyan regions. (Siwans are of Berber descent and did not speak Arabic for much of their history.) The Egyptian history I had studied as a graduate student, focused as it was on Cairo and the Nile, had little to say about the incorporation or political status of such far-flung places.

So I set out to craft a comprehensive modern history of the vast region I came to call “the Egyptian West.” My foray into the archival sources yielded many surprises. For starters, I learned that Egypt’s western border had gone undefined for most of the country’s history, and that the first modern political map attempting to delineate such a border—an Ottoman map from 1841—went missing for the better part of a century. Although various statesmen periodically noted its absence—Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, surmised that the map was “supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives”—no one seemed especially vexed by this. In fact, Egypt’s marginal borderlands were typically ignored in the cartography of the period. When they were represented at all, they were left intentionally fuzzy.

The powers in the region—Britain and the Ottoman Empire (still technically sovereign over Egypt)—actually conspired not to define the border, lest it provoke unnecessary legal or diplomatic controversy. This stance became particularly thorny during the first decade of the 20th century, when the Italian government—seeking to lay the groundwork for its colonial occupation of Libya, which would begin in 1911—repeatedly pressured the British to draw a western border.

But the Italians’ protests fell on deaf ears. Citing “the peculiar position in which Egypt stands with regards to Turkey [the Ottoman Empire],” the British agreed with the Ottomans that it was better policy to leave the border ambiguous. A bona fide border between Egypt and (Italian-controlled) Libya would not be defined until well after World War I, in 1925, following a diplomatic treaty that was signed shortly after the elusive 1841 map resurfaced at the eleventh hour. (It had been found deep inside the Ottoman archives, in Istanbul.)

Nations are not made merely by drawing borders around sovereign territory, however; they must also to some degree incorporate and assimilate their heterogeneous populations into a unified political community. In Egypt, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century, but it had mixed results.

Law was one institution that the government attempted to use as an instrument of assimilation. Beginning in the 1870s, the government passed a series of reforms that aimed to streamline jurisdiction and legal practice across the country, including the deserts and western oases. But it was not long before the government reneged on this project and ceded judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the country’s vast borderlands.

In the case of the town of Siwa, one official tried to explain the government’s striking about-face by citing the remoteness of the oasis as well as the fundamental distinctiveness of its people. “The town is far from Egypt by a distance of approximately twenty days traveling by camel,” he argued. “It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions, and tastes that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure [Bedouin] Arabs.” Here is one clear case of the modernizing Egyptian state succumbing to the extreme challenges of standardizing its institutions across the full expanse of its sovereign territory; Siwa was simply too far and too different to be folded into the Egyptian national judiciary at this time.

There would be other such cases. In 1905 and again in 1908, the Egyptian government passed legislation that sought to place its administration of the country’s various Bedouin tribes on firmer footing. The new laws—undertaken in large part to counter the trend of many Egyptians falsely claiming Bedouin descent in order to demand the exemption from military service that the tribes had long enjoyed—strove to “organize [the Bedouin tribes] in an administrative fashion approaching the organization of towns and villages.”

When it came to actually enforcing the new laws, however, the government—again hard-pressed to exert its sovereign control in the sparsely inhabited deserts—was forced to cede considerable power to the local tribal leaders themselves. Despite the veneer of formality added by the legislation, Egypt’s Bedouins were still being treated as a people apart.

So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when the Western Desert Bedouins found themselves in jail at the start of World War II, and being treated by their government like a dangerous fifth column. The Egyptian government’s internment of its people is best interpreted as a reflection of its own lack of faith in the mechanisms through which its territorial sovereignty had been asserted in the country’s western borderland. Egypt might have clarified the limits of its territorial statehood with the 1925 border treaty with Libya, but it had by no means woven an enduring social fabric for the collective nation within those boundaries.

The Egyptian state’s antagonistic relationship with its own Bedouin population continues to this day. This is clear in the Western Desert, which has emerged as a haven for militant groups reportedly linked to the Islamic State. The Egyptian government’s heavy-handed response has led to some grave mistakes, none more egregious than the security forces’ aerial assault on what turned out to be a caravan of Mexican tourists on a Bedouin-led desert safari, killing 12 and wounding numerous others. The now years-long Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, nominally waged to root out the Islamic State as well as Al-Qaeda, is another sign of enduring conflict in the borderlands.

In these present-day events are echoes of the particular history of the country’s emergence as a modern territorial nation-state. Moments of significant political upheaval, from World War II to the complicated fallout of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, have always seemed to foster contests over territorial sovereignty in the country’s borderlands. And what we see today is not so different from what the Egyptian government was struggling with over a century ago, when it first sought to consolidate the nation at the margins of its sovereignty. As a result, what it means to be Egyptian in the country’s desert borderlands remains an open question.

The post The Bedouin People Who Blur the Boundaries of Egyptian Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Answering these questions might begin with the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th century—a moment that changed empires forever, because the Spanish empire became global then in a way that was not possible earlier.

Although Alexander the Great constructed a vast Eurasian empire, and the Roman Empire regarded itself as ecumenical, neither of them incorporated the enormous variety of peoples and cultures to be found in Spain’s empire. And that variety was also characteristic of the other overseas European empires—the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British—that would follow it. This presented the rulers of these global empires with novel problems—most pointedly, the problem of managing diversity.

Differences among the subject peoples of these new global empires called for new ways of thinking about empire. Initially, European rulers were very conscious of following in the tradition of previous empires, which are among the most enduring political forms in human history. In particular, the longevity and achievements of the Roman Empire made it an exemplary empire for most of the European empires (including the Ottoman).

The continuities with the past were evident in how the European empires preserved the idea of universality. Though the existence of other empires was usually recognized, all empires tended to think of themselves—like the Roman Empire—as unique and universal, carrying a special truth about the world that they felt entitled and even obliged to carry to the whole of humanity. Usually this sense of special truth took the form of belief in the imperial mission, and it was often expressed in religious terms. Thus, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs saw themselves as the vehicle for Roman Catholicism throughout the world. The Russians justified their empire for its spread of Orthodoxy; the Dutch and British saw themselves as the champions of Protestantism; the Ottomans were the carriers of Islam.

In later years, as secularism became more pronounced in Europe, the imperial mission was conceived in less religious terms—and instead as the “civilizing mission” of the European powers, through which they spread the ideals and practices of Western civilization. Often this was coupled with the idea of imperial citizenship—the incorporation of all the subjects of the empire into a common citizenship, which they shared with the ruling people.

The ideas of universality, the civilizing mission, and common citizenship were all taken from Rome. But the modern European empires, especially the overseas ones, were also conscious that the peoples over whom they ruled possessed very different traditions and cultures from Western ones, as well as from each other. And so, though convinced generally of the superiority of European civilization, they proceeded with caution.

In the interests of order and efficiency, the promotion of the imperial mission was tempered by a recognition of the need to respect the traditions of the subject peoples. Often empires took the lead in preserving and conserving local cultures, studying the local languages, propping up indigenous institutions, and excavating and restoring often lost or decayed historical sites. This work of conservation and recovery was often done in the spirit of scholarship and intellectual inquiry. But it also had a more strategic purpose: managing diversity in far-flung empires where attempts to impose cultural uniformity might create resentment and resistance.

Such considerations also affected how the ruling peoples of empires responded to nationalism, which from the time of the French Revolution onward became a powerful force—first in Europe and then increasingly in the rest of the world (not least through the global reach of the European empires). Nationalism, which demanded that state boundaries coincide with national ones, was a threat to empires, which were almost by definition multinational and multiethnic. What made the threat all the greater was that empires themselves had often been responsible for the spread of nationalism, not only through their cultural policies of conservation, but also via educational systems that had led to the creation of a class of indigenous, westernized intellectuals who demanded a place in imperial rule—if not outright independence for their nations.

Ultimately, what brought down the empires was not nationalism. Their fall was mostly the result of two World Wars, which were fought mainly among the empires. Indeed, empires could use nationalism for their own purposes; some were particularly adept at exploiting the divisions and conflicts between the many nations that composed the empire. The Habsburg Empire, for example—from 1867 the “Austro-Hungarian” Empire—contained Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians who often saw each other as threats, and looked to the Habsburgs to preserve the peace and provide orderly administration. Muslims and Hindus in India long looked to the British Empire as a protective agency, inhibiting communal rivalries.

While managing the nationalism of the subject peoples was one thing, imperial rulers also had to be equally alert to the nationalism of the ruling peoples themselves, and to rein that in where necessary. Allowing the nationalism of the ruling people to express itself too strongly would have been a profound irritant to the other peoples in the empire, and a dangerous provocation. The ruling people—English, French, Austrians, Russians—got their sense of themselves through their imperial, not their national, identities.

One effect of empire, therefore, was a critical suppression of the national identity of the ruling peoples—a diminishment of a sense of themselves as a distinct nation. So long as the empires survived, this was not a problem for the ruling peoples, engaged as they were in the enterprise of imperial rule, and content with the identity and the spoils that this gave them (despite the high costs of empire). Once the empires had gone, though, imperial peoples were faced with a profound question of who they were, of how to find the national identity that they had previously ignored or suppressed.

Empires now seem to have gone, at least in a formal sense, and no one claims to be re-establishing an empire. Empire itself has become a dirty word; and if anyone practices it—Americans or Russians, as many have suggested—they call it something else.

But the nation-state, empire’s successor, has proved to be an awkward and in many ways unsuccessful form for dealing with the problems thrown up by multiculturalism and globalization. Its principle of “one people, one state” has turned out not to be (as 19th-century theorists hoped) a recipe for peaceful coexistence in a world of equal nations; but as a prescription for an unending cycle of violence, bred by the existence of national minorities in most states.

In such a condition—which we find ourselves in today—empires may have much to teach us about the management of difference and diversity, and of the recognition of principles that go beyond the limited vision of nationalism and the nation-state. Yes, it’s true that empires have had their day. But when they were the norm they covered the earth and they lasted for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. At the very least their study is likely to prove highly instructive.

The post Were Empires Better Than Nation-States at Managing Diversity? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.