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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
2. The Formation of Yemeni Nationalism: Initial Reflections
Fred Halliday
| And I have come to you from Saba with good tidings |
--al-Qur'an, "Sura of the Ant," verse 22 |
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The case of Yemen, including that of its nationalisms, has been relatively marginal to the study of the modern history of the Arab Middle East, which has tended to focus on Egypt and the Mashriq. Within writing on Yemen itself, there is frequent mention of nationalist movements but remarkably little sustained treatment of this issue. 1 Yet the development of nationalism in Yemen, in a country of 14 million, is a significant part of the overall story of nationalism in the Arab world and may also provide the occasion for examining a number of comparative and theoretical questions.
The Debate on Nationalism
Nationalism is both an ideology and a political phenomenon, and, in these two respects, has been present since the early nineteenth century. Yet if social science has, late in the day, come to acknowledge the importance of studying this phenomenon in a theoretical or comparative dimension, much of the writing on specific nationalisms, and hence on "nations," has remained innocent of it. My own, summary, view of the debate is that it has in some ways reached an impasse: an array of general theories is offset against a mass of individual accounts with relatively little interaction between the two. What is needed now is a moratorium on general theories, of which we have plenty, and indeed a questioning, as Sami Zubaida has suggested, of whether a general theory is either desirable or necessary. 2 What we need instead are comparative, individual, histories that are both written in the light of these general theories and that, critically, test them against the historical record.
At the center of much of this debate is the concept of "nation" itself. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of "nations" as historically given, distinct, communities had arrived. 3 As with so many other analytic categories--state, society, economy, market, race--we have now come to accept as natural and eternal what are particular, contingent, definitions.
In addition to a set of normative presumptions about loyalty and the claims of the community, nationalisms themselves seek to suppress debate on historical conditions under which "nations" come into existence and indeed what constitutes them. Nationalism has its answer to this, what can be termed the "archaeological" or "perennialist" theory: nations have always existed, or at least for what is an (undefinedly) sufficient length of time. 4 The history that needs to be written is, therefore, a teleological one, by which they "are born," "emerge," "awake," "arise," etc. In some sense "nations" exist like objects in the ground and the only question that needs to be asked is the supposedly factual one of whether, indeed, such and such a "nation" exists or not. 5 Students of the Middle East will be familiar enough with the consequences of this approach: the arguments on whether there is, or is not, an Arab nation, a Jewish nation, a Turkish nation, and so forth. All supposedly turns on a matter of fact, on accumulating enough evidence to "prove" that such an entity exists or, alternatively, in adducing enough evidence to show that it does not, is "artificial," the result of migration or whatever. The result of such a perennialist scheme is the same as when any optative, ethical, and normative concept is projected onto reality that does not conform: an effort goes into explaining why this reality does not conform to the ideal.
The alternative approach, which Anthony Smith calls "modernism," is to write the history of nations not as teleological and necessary processes but as the emergence of a set of contingencies. Nations are therefore communities that happen to come about through accidents of history, war, and geography and that are one among many other possible such outcomes. Such an approach carries with it the implication of the modernity of nations--i.e., that they cannot be identified prior to the existence of the ideological and social conditions that give them meaning, namely in the early nineteenth century. Identifiable linguistic and cultural groups, peoples, or, in a clear pre-nationalist sense, "nations" can be accepted, but these are not nations in the contemporary sense, nor, it must be emphasized, was it inevitable that they should become so. A range of sociological theories, be they those of Anderson or Gellner, would be variants of this approach. 6 These differ in the accounts they give and in their normative implications, Anderson being less dismissive of nationalism than Gellner, but they converge in seeing nations as contingent products of modernity. Another, well-established, variant of this modernist approach is the Marxist theory of nations: this relates the emergence of nations both to the general condition of capitalist modernity and industrialization and, more specifically, to the development of classes within this modernity for whom nationalism constitutes an appropriate ideology. Much has been written against Marxist theory, its teleological assumptions and disdain for nationalisms, but some of this could equally apply to nineteenth-century liberal writing on the subject. The Marxist tradition has, however, the merit of postulating some relationship between nationalism and socioeconomic change and in suggesting that social groups have differential relations to the idea of "nation."
This modernist account is, in summary form, the theory that would be suggested by the writings of sociologists and Marxist historians alike, but the obstacles to its acceptance are clear enough. On the one hand, it would undermine much of the historiography, nationalist or other, that uses some variant of the archaeological approach. On the other hand, the claim of modernity and contingency is open to misuse: we know this argument from situations of political contestation, where nationalists seek to deny not only the claim of another people to territory or whatever but also the very claim that the other side are a "nation" at all. Such a denial is central in, say, the Irish case, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the Indo-Pakistani conflict: the modernist argument against perennialism that denies the reality and legitimation of history has become an instrument of polemic and has hence been discredited for this reason. Equally, any acceptance of the polyvalence of identities, i.e., of the denial of historically constituted and legitimizing essences, would provoke resistance from within nationalist movements.
One compromise has suggested a distinction between "historic" and "new" nations; yet in terms of ideology and the role of states in promoting such ideologies they are all modern, products of contingency in the new international and normative climate created from the early nineteenth century onward and of the process of state formation that has accompanied it. The solution to the problem of the history of "nations" is neither to assert a perennialism nor to waste time, political or academic, in boosting or denying the historicity of particular "nations": we can examine how bits of the past have been selected for current uses, but this is not to ascribe causality to this past. The question of the political behavior of "nations," and indeed of the legitimacy of claims to people or territory, can therefore be delinked from that of history.
To write about the nationalisms of any contemporary "nation" is to write within the framework of such a comparative contingency. To suggest a working guideline: nothing more than two centuries old should be of relevance to either history or legitimation. The research agenda that such an approach entails would comprise at four major points. First, it would identify the general historicity of this "nation" in the sense of how recently it was formed, and the dependence of this formation on a broader, international, context--it being one of the paradoxes of nationalism that while each claims its uniqueness all are modular variants of a simple code, products of a universal trend of the past century or two. Second, it would seek to identify the specific causation, those particular historical factors that contributed to the formation of this nation, with the territory, culture, historical self-image it possesses. Such an account of causation would be antiperennialist in that it would deny any necessary development to this nation. Third, it would be necessary to delineate the specific ideological content of this nationalism, not by demanding that it conform to a specific unitary model, based on ethnicity language or anything else, but rather by recognizing, beyond its modular, common, form< a name="txt8"> 8 the diversity and contradictions within it, as well as the changes that could occur in even relatively short periods of time. There would be no place in such an account for discussion of which version of the national ideology is "genuine" or not.
Finally, as part of the investigation of cause and of contingency, this research agenda would examine the instrumentality of nationalism, the relation of this nationalism to identifiable social and political groups--in other words the history not of the emergence of a given or an essence but of the creation of both ideology and movement by political forces. If nothing else, this would relate the apparently abstract history of an idea to material and real-world forces, and further preclude any argument to the effect that one group in a society rather than another has a more accurate claim to represent the "genuine" national message. Much of this would involve a study of state-building and of the ways in which those aiming to take power, or retain it, have generated and managed ideas of nation. In Marxist accounts, the role of states would itself be a function of the role of classes. If class has somewhat less of a direct role than orthodox Marxists would suggest, it may provide more of the explanation than idealist or abstracted sociological accounts would claim.
In the Middle East as elsewhere, nationalisms have been modern, contingent, and confused, and the instrumental ideologies and the movements corresponding to them have reflected this. In what follows I shall take one particular nationalism, that of Yemen, and present, in outline form, an account of its formation.
In the conventional nationalist account, the Yemeni nation is an ancient one, having established a settled civilization in the fertile south-west part of Arabia some millennia ago. 9 The high point of this civilization was comprised by the kingdoms of Ma'in, Saba, and Himyar, which have left extensive archaeological ruins. One example of the characteristically inclusive, "perennialist" claims of Yemeni nationalism to the whole past is to be found in a poster of "South Arabian Scripts" sold in the Salah Museum of Ta'iz, a former palace of the Hamid al-Din Imams. The scripts, designated as "South Arabian" and hence part of the national inheritance, are: Himyaritic, Sabaean, Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
These South Arabian kingdoms were significant in the broader history of the Middle East, in part because of the long-distance trade links to India and the states at the top of the Red Sea, in part because migration spread across the Red Sea to Ethiopia, whose languages comprise several descendants of the ancient South Arabian tongues (Amharic, Tigrinya) and use variants of the ancient scripts. 10 With the advent of Islam, Yemen became part of the Arab and Islamic worlds and contributed both militarily to the Islamic conquests and culturally to the mediaeval Islamic period. 11 From the tenth century onward, Yemen seceded from the Abbasid realm and so ceased to be part of the broader Islamic empires: in a more limited space than that earlier denominated by the term "Yaman," it was ruled by a succession of dynasties, controlling more or less of to-day's Yemeni territory. The last of these to control most of to-day's North and South were the Qasimis, who ruled in the mid-seventeenth century. In the early modern period, Yemen fell under various degrees of external influence and control--in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Dutch and the Portuguese yielding to the Ottomans, and in the nineteenth century the Ottomans and the British dividing the country between them. Under Ottoman rule the term "Yaman" came to have its most restricted usage, comprising the sanjaqs of Sana'a, Hudeida, and Ta'iz, i.e., the territory that, after 1918, came to be the Imamate of Yemen and, after 1962, the Yemen Arab Republic.
In the twentieth century we can see, so the story goes, the gradual reemergence of the Yemeni nation within the area of historic "Yemen." 12 Prior to World War I the rule of the Ottomans was challenged by the forces of the Zeidi Imam, and it was he who took over the whole of North Yemen when the Turks departed in 1918. Although at first cautious about challenging the British to the South, the Imam gradually came to assert a claim to the whole of "natural Yemen." In the 1940s there began to develop political oppositions, to both the Imams in the North and the British in the South. The former, the "Free Yemeni" movement, sought to free the North from the dictatorial rule of the Zeidi Imams and in 1948 staged an unsuccessful coup. Its critique of the Imam was initially phrased in religious terms, calling for an end to the Imam's oppression, dhulm, through various forms of taxation, and for an Islamic revival to be carried out through a corps of Islamic militants: these, the shabab al-amr, would travel through the country mobilizing support for the nahda or renaissance and overcoming the ignorance of the population. 13 The aim was as much to establish a truly Islamic Imamate as to replace it. Influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, these Free Yemenis only later turned to a more secular political vocabulary. In the South, political movements in the port of Aden began to articulate the demand for greater self-rule, for Aden itself: the initial slogan, "Aden for the Adenis" was directed both against the British and the more conservative, "backward" rural society of South and North. 14
By the 1950s, and with the rise of Arab nationalism elsewhere in the region, the predominant politics of the oppositions in North and South was nationalistic, involving support not only for the general goal of "Arab unity" but also for "Yemeni" unity. Nationalists in North and South differed on whether there could be unity under the Imams, but the assumption was that Yemen was one country, wrongly divided by oppressors colonial and dynastic, and that once these oppressors had been removed unity would follow. Following the defeat of the 1948 revolt, the opposition in the North consisted of intellectuals on the one hand and of subterranean officer groups on the other: it was to be the latter who, in September 1962, overthrew the Imam and proclaimed the "Yemen Arab Republic." From the early 1950s onward there was a gradual shift in the language of the opposition, so that when in 1956 the Free Yemenis issued a new set of demands, matalib al-sha'b, it presented the Yemeni people as part of the Arab nation, committed to Arab unity. 15 The goal of an Islamic Imamate had gone.
The nationalist opposition in the South was originally based in the trades union movement in Aden and, as part of its support for Arab and Yemeni unity, opposed the British-backed plan for a separate South Arabian state, in which the conservative rural rulers would play a predominant role. Following the outbreak of the revolution in the North, the opposition spread to the countryside of South Yemen and an active guerrilla movement developed. During the period 1963-1967 the guerrilla movement became a major contender for power in both Aden and the countryside, dividing, in the process, into two groupings, a Nasserist FLOSY and a more radical "Marxist-Leninist" National Liberation Front. It was the NLF that then came to power in the South and that, in various guises, was to rule there up to the unification agreement of 1990 and until its defeat in the war of 1994.
The period between 1967, when South Yemen became an independent state, and 1994, when the North conquered the South, was one in which both regimes espoused a nationalist position, asserting their place in the Arab world and calling for Yemeni unity. 16 However, contrary to the expectations of nationalism unity did not follow the departure of the British in 1967; instead the two states set about supporting opposition movements within each other's territory: both claimed to be the bearers of nationalist legitimacy and to represent the whole country. As a result no diplomatic relations were exchanged, although, intermittently, political links between them subsisted. On two occasions, in 1972 and 1979, the two states fought short border wars, the first being an attempt by the North, with Saudi and Libyan backing, to conquer the South, the second being an attempt by the South, in alliance with the left-wing guerrillas of the National Democratic Front, to advance in the North. From the early 1980s relations improved and a set of "unity" committees were set up. These made little progress, but in 1989-1990 matters accelerated, as the end of the Cold War and the internal weaknesses of both regimes led them to agree to enter a provisional unification. To much popular acclaim in both North and South, this occurred in May 1990, followed by general elections in April 1993: however, disagreements over the allocation of power within the postelectoral system, and rising distrust between the two leaderships, led to a de facto split in the country in early 1994, followed at the end of April by an outright Northern attack on the South. On 7 July 1994 Northern forces entered Aden, thus effectively unifying the country under one regime for the first time in several centuries. 17
In broad historical and ideological terms, the nationalism of the Yemen is part of the broader pattern of nationalism in the Arab world, and indeed the third world, delayed somewhat by the region's comparative isolation and later decolonization. 18 Thus it can be seen as having grown in the 1930s and 1940s in reflection of changes in Egypt and Iraq, and as having acquired a powerful impetus from the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and what followed. The emergence of a radical left, in North and South, was a part of the changes within the Movement of Arab Nationalists 19 and, to a lesser extent, of the emergence of Ba'thi and Communist trends. The strength of the left-wing MAN was a result both of the radicalization of the Palestinian movement and of the Yemeni situation, where the republican left, increasingly angered by Egyptian compromises with Saudi Arabia, developed well before June 1967 its own specifically Yemeni critique of the "petty bourgeois regimes." 20
From the 1950s onward the tone and vocabulary of Yemeni nationalism was that of other Arab nationalisms--against imperialism and Zionism and, in its later left variant, against the "petty bourgeois" regimes and their allies. It also reflected changes in colonial policy and administration that were not specific to the Middle East: increased concern in the 1930s to assert control of previously autonomous areas, enhancement of particular colonies for reasons of imperial strategy, the rise of the oil industry, the abandonment by colonial powers of a permanent commitment. The subsequent changes in nationalism also reflect shifts within the Arab context. The use of these apparently universal Arab nationalist terms may, however, conceal more particular local meanings: thus the failure of "petty bourgeois" Nasserism was primarily identified as being a result of Egypt's inability to fight the Yemeni royalists and the Saudis. Hence what might seem to be an exogenous, mimetic, adoption of general Arab nationalist terms concealed a modular, endogenous usage. There are, moreover, a number of other, more specific, features of this nationalism that merit attention.
Double Genesis
In the first place, as a reflection of the division of Yemen into two states, Yemeni nationalism had a double genesis, reflecting the different conditions in North and South. In the South nationalism was mainly the conventional third world variant, directed against British colonial rule and in favor of national independence. In the North it was more akin to that of the earlier, antiabsolutist nationalism of Europe, being directed against the Hamid al-Din Imamate and initially aiming not to establish a republican regime but to install a more equitable Imam. But these nationalist strands were not completely separate: while the North also espoused an anticolonial element, insofar as it called for the union of Yemen and the expulsion of British colonialism, the nationalism of the South had its own social radicalism in that it reflected the division within the South between the nationalist movement and the existing political hierarchy of Sultans and tribal leaders within the South Arabian Federation. There was, therefore, both an anticolonial and a politically egalitarian dimension to Yemeni nationalism, reflecting the two sources of the movement.
Social radicalism
The second element of Yemeni nationalism that merits special attention is its social radicalism, the espousal of an idea of "revolution" directed not only against colonial rule but also against the indigenous political and social elites. Forms of radicalism could be found in other variants of Arab nationalism, and the word "revolution" [thawra] came to have a generic, promiscuous diffusion in modern political rhetoric. In the Yemeni case, however, the role of popular movements, organized by radical political parties, was perhaps greater than elsewhere, in part because of the more rigid social structure in the North and Southern hinterlands, in part because of the absence of that intermediary institution, the modernizing armed forces, which had played such an important role in many other Arab states: to put it in the terminology of the times, it was harder for "petty bourgeois" regimes to establish themselves in Yemen than elsewhere, although in the end they did. Thus in much Yemeni political rhetoric the revolution was as much that of the oppressed poor [al-kadihin] as of the Yemeni nation as such.
Yemen and the Arab world
If Yemeni nationalism presented itself as part of the Arab world and of the Arab nationalist movement, it also demarcated itself from this in a specific manner. This was not just a question of the combination of ideological identities, as in the Egyptian or Iraqi cases, but of their being contrasted, i.e., of the Yemeni identity being defined in opposition to that of the Arab world outside. At least three factors can be seen as playing a role here. First, while Yemeni nationalism embraced the country's Islamic identity, the past invoked to justify the "nation" began with the pre-Islamic civilizations. 21 Thus for Yemenis the concept of jahiliyya, of the pre-Islamic period being one of "ignorance," is unacceptable, not least because of the contrast that it highlights between what was happening in Yemen and what was taking place elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemeni nationalists often set the sons of Qahtan (the Yemenis) against those of 'Adnan (the Bedouin, Saudis, etc.). Second, if Yem eni nationalism has been directed against external rule in the form of British and earlier Ottoman colonialism it has also been directed against an Arab neighbor, Saudi Arabia. This is a factor relatively absent in other Arab states and is a reflection of the fact that, in the period in which Arab nationalisms wer greater than elsewhere, in part because of the more rigid soce formed, i.e., after World War I, the Arabian Peninsula was the only area where independent Arab states existed and could engage in interstate, nationalism-provoking activities. The clashes in the 1920s and early 1930s with Saudi Arabia have been compounded by the treatment of Yemenis in Saudi Arabia during the oil boom and by the ongoing political, including border, disputes between the two states. It could be said, with only a little simplification, that the main "national" enemy of Yemen is a neighboring Arab state. This sense of contrast with other Arab states is further compounded by the experience of the Egyptian military presence during the 1960s: even among those republicans whom the Egyptians were supporting, there was a strong sense of antipathy to the supposed liberators, one amply reciprocated, as is well known, by the Egyptians themselves.
This uneasy relation to Arab nationalism is well illustrated in the documents of the Southern nationalist movement. In the NLF's founding document of 1965 the Arabs are referred to as the people [sha'b] to whom the Yemenis belong, but by the 1970s the Yemenis were to become the sha'b and the Arabs the looser umma. Similarly, while in the 1970 South Yemeni constitution Yemen is a district [iqlim] of the Arab world, by 1978 Yemen itself is the watan, the homeland. 22 Thus while the Arab identity was in no sense rejected or overtly challenged, the Yemeni dimension came be given greater centrality.
Yemeni "Unity"
The role of "unity" within Yemeni politics reflects both a general Arab aspiration and a particular Yemeni one. Thus the support for Arab unity, from the 1950s onward, served not only to express Yemen's membership of and participation in the Arab world but also to attract to Yemen support--military, political, financial--from other Arab states: it reflected Yemen's relative isolation and poverty. However unity also meant the resolution of a specific more local problem, the fragmentation of Yemen itself. Most obviously, this pertained to the division between North and South, ascribed, as we have seen, to the policies of colonial powers. Prior to the 1950s the area now known as South Yemen was known as "Aden," or "the Protectorates," later as "South Arabia" [Junub al-Jazira al-'Arabiyya] or the "Arab South" [al-Junub al-'Arabi] and it was only from the late 1950s that terms such as "Yemeni South" [al-Junub al-Yamani] or "South Yemen" [Junub al-Yaman] came into political usage, alongside that of South Arabia. 23 A proper charting of the shifting denomination of the "Yemeni" area in the writing and political rhetoric of the period remains to be written: the most cursory review indicates, however, a fast, politically inspired shifting of nomenclature, with at any one time frequent uncertainties and alternative usages. 24 But there were further elements to this call for unity: the demand for the return of the three provinces occupied by Saudi Arabia in 1934; hostility to political movements in the South, be they Aden-based or more broadly "South Arabian," 25 which wanted to maintain the inherited divisions of the country; and, implicitly, support for the idea of national integration and centralization in the face of a highly fragmented, regional and tribal society. This assertion of a Yemeni national identity was also designed to preclude emergence of other, potential, contemporary "nationalisms"--Adeni, Hadrami, 'Asiri.
In comparative annals of modern nationalism, the Yemeni case may appear to be more historically rooted than that of many others, including some in the Middle East. 26 Yet, even if this is so, this historical overview, and the discussion of particular ideological elements in Yemeni nationalism, provides the raw material for recognition of the contingent formation of Yemeni nationalism. In the first place, the general historicity of Yemeni nationalism, i.e., the role of the international and universalizing context, can be analyzed in terms of a number of processes: changes in international trade and strategy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the impact of changes in colonial administration on the South, the introduction of ideas of social and political organization from the Arab world and elsewhere (including the British trades union movement and Indonesian politics, the latter mediated via emigres in South-East Asia), and the political evolution of the Arab world from the 1940s onward. Thus the particular history and formation of Yemeni nationalism took place within a broader, universalizing context.
Analysis of the specific causation of Yemeni nationalism would encompass both the preexisting social and political structures in the country and the impact on Yemen of external events, including the rise of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, the explosion of the Palestine question in the 1940s (with the very specific impact on Yemen of the departure of the Jewish community hitherto seen as part of the Yemeni people), 27 and the Egyptian revolution of 1952. It would, however, also address the contingency of this nationalism taking the form it did. In the first place there is the contingency of space: there was nothing inevitable in "national" Yemen either comprising or excluding the territory that it did. Given the divisions within Yemeni society prior to, and indeed accompanying, the rise of the nationalist movement, other outcomes are more than conceivable: Aden could have remained separate, becoming eventually a separate cosmopolitan nation-state, an Arab equivalent of Singapore to the rest of the Yemen's Malaysia, a Qatar or a Kuwait; the Hadramaut could also have broken away as could any of the other seventeen political entities in the South or the Zeidi parts of the North; 28 political Yemen could have extended to include the southern, Dhofar, region of the Sultanate of Oman, an area historically claimed by Yemenis and with more geographic and social continuity with the Mahra province of Yemen than with the rest of Oman. 29 Had the Saudis pursued their conquests in 1934, the whole of North Yemen might have been incorporated into Saudi Arabia and Yemen would today have the status of Hijaz, an entity with some historical distinctiveness but with, in Anthony Smith's terms, an unrealized substratum. Equally, had the British not been there, the Saudis might have annexed Hadramaut, a region where "Yemeni" sentiment is intermittent at best and that would have given them direct access to the Indian Ocean. 30
This contingency extends to that of ideology. We see in Yemeni nationalism the combination of elements found in other Middle Eastern nationalisms--pre-Islamic, Islamic, Arab, third worldist, local, in this case, Yemeni: far from these being set by history, or necessarily contradictory, they are combined in a mutually supportive, and changing, manner. The history textbooks used in schools stress a "people" in continuous time and without tribal or other fragmentary characteristics who have acted to create the modern Yemen. 31 In declarations of state each of the four elements is deployed to endorse the existence of a historic, natural, Yemeni "nation," with changing emphases reflecting changing circumstances: thus when Yemen faces conflict with Saudi Arabia, it is conventional to appeal to "the sons of Saba and Himyar"; when Yemeni politicians respond to events in Palestine, or the Gulf, their "Arabness" is highlighted; in times of rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, emphasis is given to Islamic fraternity and the contribution of Yemen to Islam. On the other hand, the varying emphases also reflect shifts in the political situation within the country: thus the "Islamic" element has been prominent in two periods, in the 1940s, with the rise of the Free Yemeni opposition, and again from the late 1980s, with the emergence of an Islamist current, al-Islah. Again, there are no constraints on the combination, or adjustment, of these different ideological components.
Behind such accounts of ideology, and of definitions developed and changed, lies the question of instrumentality, of the use of these ideas by political leaderships, in or out of power, to serve their particular ends. Much of the discourse of nation and nationalism revolves around the state, not least through the efforts of states to promote a specific "national" awareness against external and internal, centrifugal forces. Nowhere is this more so than with regard to the question of "unity" itself. While this corresponded to a widespread popular sentiment, one that combined easily with support for Arab unity, it was articulated by political leaderships for their own, instrumental, reasons. Thus in the 1950s the Imam used "Yemeni unity" as a means of advancing his dynastic claim to influence in the South and to the territory occupied by the British. After the revolution of 1962, the Sana'a government used "unity" as a means of enhancing their domestic legitimacy, countering British involvement in support of the royalists in the North and mobilizing support for their own regime from the population in the South. Once two Yemeni states came into existence in 1967, "unity" became an instrument for conducting relations, mostly of rivalry, between the two regimes. While on the one hand "unity" reflected some common interests between the two states, in matters of economic development and tourism, little progress was made in this regard; more substantively, the two regimes used "unity" to legitimate forms of pressure on the other.
For much of the late 1960s and 1970s this involved support for guerrilla opposition within the other state, but on two occasions it led to war. Both wars, those of 1972 and 1979, were attempts by one regime, using the slogan of "unity" and in alliance with opposition forces within the other state, to advance their interests. For the South unity had long been, and remained, part not only of the reintegration of the Yemeni homeland but of the transformation of the North as well. Thus in the aftermath of independence South Yemeni officials insisted that "Yemeni unity . . . is a unity of the toiling people, and must be made by them. . . . This unity must be progressive and must not be racial or regional in character, and must be hostile to colonialism and reaction." 32 The pre-1962 argument, that there could not be unity until there had been a transformation in the North, now became one that unity would be achieved by promoting such a transformation.
This instrumentality remained central in the period of unification itself, 1990-1994. Each regime hoped that it could use unification both to enhance its own position within its respective area of power and advance it in the area of the other. Unity was, therefore, not a policy aimed at fusion but an instrument for inter-regime competition. If, at first, it appeared as if this was not a zero-sum game, and that both sides could ben efit from and live with the unity agreement, the elections of 1993 showed that, in reality, each was bent on consolidating within its own territory: however, the situation had so changed that the North now believed it could impose its will on the South, a goal that, after some months of preparation and misleading negotiation, it proceeded to meet. Yemeni unity was thus achieved by the successful imposition of the Northern regime's power on the South, in alliance both with Islamists in the North, and with dissident exiles from the South. 33
As already noted, both between and within states "unity" reflected another, more general, goal: namely that of state-building. North Yemeni society is more socially fragmented than that of any other regional country, with the exception of Afghanistan, a fragmentation reflected in the lack of influence of the central government outside the major cities, and the widespread distribution of arms in society. In most discussion of Yemen, by Yemenis and others, this armed rural population is referred to as "tribal": few of these inhabitants of the rural areas are nomadic, and the term "tribe" is used in a number of senses, but the fact of such diffusion of power, arms and identity is clear enough. 34 In the South, British rule made some impact on the tribal system, and the Socialist Party went much further in the direction of centralization. Advocacy of "unity" entailed both the creation of a single "Yemeni" political culture and the strengthening of the powers of the state itself. At the ideological level, this involved a denial, with mixed impact, of the "tribal," regional, and sectarian differences within Yemen, and hence an assertion of the legitimacy of the central state. 35 In practice, it meant that both states sought to reduce the power of the armed rural population, the South more successfully than the North. In the North during the 1970s the regime of President Ibrahim al-Hamdi promoted closer ties with the South as part of an attempt to strengthen the central government. 36 Probably one of the main considerations of the Sana'a regime in entering the unity process in 1990 was its hope that it could use the Southern army and administrative apparatus to strengthen itself in the North. The irony was that, when it came to the war of 1994, Sana'a could only prevail by making significant concessions to the centrifugal forces.
To this discussion of the instrumentality of unity as far as states are concerned can be conjoined that of the instrumentality of classes. It is not difficult to write a history of Yemeni nationalism in "class" terms, seeing nationalism in general, and the idea of unity in particular, as the ideologies of particular classes seeking to advance their interests against the prevailing, fragmented, state structures. Thus in the North unity was espoused first by dissident sada or chiefs and merchants, denied their proper status by the Imams, and then by the newly rising social groups--intellectuals, educated technocrats, and army officers and, later, the incipient trades union and peasant movements. The radical left in the North, which clashed with the regime in the late 1960s, and that waged guerrilla war between 1978 and 1982, saw itself as the vanguard of a mass movement that would bring about unity through overthrowing the military and tribal forces dominating the country. 37 In the South it was the rising trades union movement in Aden, later backed by a radicalized rural population, that pioneered unity against those social interests, merchants in Aden, and Sultans in the countryside, whose interest lay in preserving a separate, and itself fragmented, South.
Such "class analysis" may often have taken a simplified, crude, form, one that would have been inappropriate not just for any country in the Middle East but for any more developed society as well. To reject such reductionist use of class analysis is not, however, to preclude that there was a wide-ranging and multiple interaction of classes with ideas of nation and nationalism, and that any history of nationalism in Yemen, as elsewhere, must take such an interaction into account. Here again comparative contingency may be a suitable guideline: the question is not whether nationalism was determined by class, or unrelated to it but how, within the general context of modernity and under the impact of exogenous political and social change, specific articulations of class and nationalist ideology occurred. All may not be the work of the undifferentiated "proletariat," "petty bourgeoisie," or, in the Yemeni case, sayyadin (fishermen), and all resistance did not come from iqta'in (feudalists) but these forces certainly played a part.
This essay has attempted to provide an analysis of nationalism in Yemen within the framework of "comparative contingency." 38 The aim has been to show not how a Yemeni "nation" has existed for centuries or millennia, or how such a preexisting "nation" has "arisen" or "woken up" but, rather, how a set of recent processes, some international, some within Yemen, have combined to produce a nationalist movement and discourse and to give them their particular content. That, in accordance with the universal pressures operating on it, Yemen would have had to produce some form of "nationalism" by the middle of the twentieth century was inevitable (even Qatar has been able to do so), but that it produced the particular form it did, and in the time it occurred, reflects a set of contingent events and processes. Equally, while the population as a whole has been involved in this diffusion of a nationalist ideology, the actual content and emphasis of this ideology has varied between time and place, reflecting the instrumental usage of nationalism by aspirant political leaderships and established regimes alike. It follows that the Yem enis had to be part of some nationalist process, in the conditions of the modern world; that they were incorporated into this particular nationalism was a result of the multiple contingencies already discussed. In neither case was the outcome the result of a historical determination derived from the existence of this "nation" nor was the outcome predetermined as to the geographical context or ideological content of this nationalism. Nor indeed is the process yet over, as tensions between secular and religious forces in Yemen, as elsewhere in the region, demonstrate. All of which is without prejudice to claims about contemporary belief or political legitimacy.
Notes
Note 1: For the North, see J. Leigh Douglas, The Free Yemeni Movement, 1935-1962 (Beirut, 1987); Sultan Naji, "The Genesis of the Call for Yemeni Unity," in B. R. Pridham (ed.), Contemporary Yemen: Politics and Historical Background (Beckenham, Kent, 1984); for the South, T. Bernier, "Naissance d'un nationalisme arabe à Aden," L'Afrique et l'Asie no. 44 (1958); M. S. al-Habashi, Aden (Algiers, 1964); Ahmad Jabir 'Afif, al-Haraka al-Wataniyya fi al-Yaman (Damascus, 1982); Joseph Kostiner, The Struggle for South Yemen (Beckenham, Kent, 1984). My own Arabia without Sultans (Harmondsworth, 1974) provides an early account of the nationalist movement in the South. The special issue of Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediterrannée, "Yemen, passé et présent de l'unité," no. 67 (1993) has several relevant articles, notably those by Paul Dresch, Jacques Coland, and Abu Bakr al-Saqqaf. Back.
Note 2: In Sami Zubaida (ed.), Race and Racism (London, 1978). Back.
Note 2: Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism (2d. ed.; London, 1983), 21, gives a clear account of the "core" doctrines. Back.
Note 4: I am grateful to Anthony Smith for the term "perennialist," the alternative, in his analysis, to "modernism" as in the work of Gellner and Anderson. Smith categorises himself as an "ethno-symbolist." For the development of his critique of "modernism" see National Identity (London, 1991). Back.
Note 5: The term "identity" is, in its current political usage, another recent, contingent term with the implicit normative claim that an individual must conform to this set of given characteristics. In strict philosophic terms, an individual can only be identical with him/herself. Back.
Note 6: Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Anderson, Imagined Communities. Back.
Note 7: Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780; Ephraim Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism (London, 1991); Fred Halliday, "Bringing the 'Economic' Back In: the Case of Nationalism," Economy and Society 21:4 (November 1992). Back.
Note 8: I.e., the espousal of the core doctrines identified above, note 3. Back.
Note 9: For standard Yemeni accounts see Afif Jabir and Said el-Attar Le Sous-Développement économique et sociale du Yemen (Algiers, 1964). Back.
Note 10: Robert Stookey, Yemen: The Politics of the Yemen Arab Republic (Boulder, 1978), chapter 1. Back.
Note 11: 'Abd al-Muhsin Mad'aj al-Mad'aj, The Yemen in Early Islam: A Political History (London, 1988). Back.
Note 12: As in other cases, the attempt to identify a "historic" territory lends itself to maximalist claims. The Yemeni geographer al-Hamdani (born 280/893) and other Arab writers delineate a Yemeni land from somewhere south of Mecca that often stretches well into contemporary Oman. The largest claims are, however, based on earlier delimitations: Ptolemy's Arabia Felix, often equated with Yemen, stretched from south of Aqaba and over to the Persian Gulf. Some Muslim writers derive the name "Yemen" from the story according to which the prophet Muhammad, atop a hill near Tabuk, delimited all to the north as al-sham, and all to the south (i.e., to his right) as al-yaman (see the interesting survey in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 4, 1155-1158). Paul Dresch reports that in northern discourse yaman was often synonymous with south of wherever one is standing, the opposite being qibli, i.e., toward Mecca. (Paul Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen, Oxford, 1989). Back.
Note 13: Douglas, "Free Yemeni Movement," 50-68. Back.
Note 14: See al-Habashi, Aden. Back.
Note 15: Douglas, "Free Yemeni Movement," 216. Back.
Note 16: I have gone into this in detail in Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen 1967-1987 (Cambridge, 1990), chapter 4, "The Enigmas of Yemeni 'Unity.' " Back.
Note 17: On the 1994 conflict see Sheila Carapico, "From Ballot Box to Battlefield: The War of the Two 'Alis," Middle East Report, no. 190 (September/October 1994): 24-27; Fred Halliday, "The Third Inter-Yemeni War," Asian Affairs 26:2 (June 1995): 131-140; Jamal al-Suwaidi (ed.), The Yemeni War of 1994 (London, 1995). Back.
Note 18: Comparison may be made with a modernizing nationalism in other third world states that avoided colonial rule-Nepal, Afghanistan, Ethiopia. Back.
Note 19: On the role of the Arab Nationalists Movement in Yemen see Sultan Ahmad 'Umar, Nazra fi Tatawwur al-Mujtama' al-Yamani (Beirut, 1970); Kostiner, Struggle; Walid Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World (London, 1975). Back.
Note 20: See 'Umar, Nazra; Kostiner, Struggle; and my Arabia without Sultans. Back.
Note 21: At times of confrontation, real or imagined, with Saudi Arabia, official speeches appeal to "the sons of Saba and Himyar." The queen of Saba (or Sheba), Bilqis, is an important, often invoked, figure in Yemeni myths and history: the emblem of the (pre-1990) North Yemeni State and ruling party consisted of "the pillars of Bilqis." Back.
Note 22: Revolution and Foreign Policy, 105-107. Back.
Note 23: I am grateful to the distinguished Yemeni historian, the late Sultan Naji, for verbal elucidation on this point. Back.
Note 24: Thus in the founding document of the National Liberation Front, the 1965 Charter, the southern area is referred to as both "South Yemen" and "the Yemeni south" so that the very name of the organization is rendered alternatively as al-Jabha al-Qawmiyya li-Tahrir Junub al-Yaman al-Muhtall (64) and as al-Jabha al-Qawmiyya li-Tahrir al-Junub al-Yamani al-Muhtall (109): al-Mithaq al-Watani, text agreed at first congress of the NLF, 22-25 June 1964, Aden, n.d. Back.
Note 25: In the aftermath of the 1994 inter-Yemeni war some people in the South began to reject the term "Yemeni" and to describe themselves again as "South Arabian." A southern term of abuse for northern administrative practices was "Turkish." Back.
Note 26: Paul Dresch, "A Daily Plebiscite: Nation and State in Yemen," in Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediterrannée no. 67 (1993): 68. Back.
Note 27: On the Jewish community in Yemen see the chapters in Joseph Chelhod and others, L'Arabie du Sud: Histoire et civilisation, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984). Back.
Note 28: Dresch, "Daily Plebiscite," 73, alludes to the possibility of the tribal areas of the east and north, known as Hamdan, forming a separate nation. Back.
Note 29: In the immediate aftermath of Southern independence, in 1967, some Yemenis did assert this claim, but it was never sustained. A related dispute over the Kuria Muria Islands was also shelved (Revolution and Foreign Policy, 13, 21). Back.
Note 30: Among the ways in which Hadramaut does not conform is the failure of its inhabitants to chew the narcotic leaf qat. Back.
Note 31: Dresch, Tribes, 389-391. Back.
Note 32: Summary of World Broadcast, ME/2994/A/9, 7 February 1969. Back.
Note 33: Associates of former President 'Ali Nasir Muhammad, ousted in an inter-regime clash in 1986 (al-Hayat, 21 July 1994). Back.
Note 34: See Dresch, Tribes, especially chapter 9, on the meanings of "tribe" and shifting "tribal" identities. Back.
Note 35: In the South, the revolutionary regime in 1967 banned the use of "tribal" names to denote regions and instead, on the Algerian model of the wilaya, divided the country up into six muhafazat or governorates. This did not prevent people from continuing to use the tribal/regional names, and in the 1980s, as part of an attempt to reduce the distance between regime and population the anterior names were restored. Back.
Note 36: Robert Burrowes, The Yemen Arab Republic: The Politics of Development 1962-1986 (Boulder, 1987), chapter 5. Back.
Note 37: Hizb al-Wahda al-Sha'biyya al-Yamaniyya, "al-Barnamij al-Siyasi," 1979. Hizb al-Wahda was the core party around which the larger National Democratic Front, set up in 1976, organized. In 1990, following the unification of North and South, it merged with the Yemeni Socialist Party in the South. Back.
Note 38: For one other attempt to do this, in the case of Eritrean nationalism, see Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London, 1981), chapter 5. Back.
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