Introduction and History:
League of Arab States, founded on March 22 1945, was among the first post-second World War international entities – predating even the United Nations and Britton Woods institutions. Its formation was aimed at several objectives. Its basic mission has been to improve coordination among its members on matters of common interest. The league was manifest to concerns about postwar colonial divisions of territory as well as strong opposition to the ongoing moves to the emergence of a Jewish state on Palestinian territory. It began with eight Arab states[1] as its members which were independent at that time and currently has 22 members[2] and 7 observer states, including India. It is headquartered in Cairo and has several subsidiary organs with specialised domains. As an inter-governmental organisation, it is represented in several international bodies and has a presence in several capitals including New Delhi.
Basic Structure:
The Arab League has an elaborate 20-article Charter laying down its structure and basic tenets. All policy decisions are taken by voting process with each member state having one vote. Its secretariat is headed by a Secretary General elected by its members by a two-thirds majority. Its decisions, if adopted by consensus are binding on all member states. However, if taken by majority vote, they are binding only on those member-states which voted in favour. It is expected to have meetings at levels of permanent representatives, foreign ministers (“The Council”) and a Summit. The Charter identifies six specific domains (Economic & Financial Affairs; Communications; Culture, Nationality, Social Affairs; and Health Affairs) each to be headed by a specialised Committee. The Charter prohibits resort to force to resolve the dispute between two or more member states. The Council shall mediate in all differences which threaten to lead to war between two member-states, or a member-state and a third state, to bring about their reconciliation. Decisions of arbitration and mediation shall be taken by majority vote. Considering the special circumstances of Palestine and until that country can effectively exercise its independence, the Council was empowered by an annexe to the Charter to take charge of the selection of an Arab representative from Palestine to take part in its work. Eventually, the moves by the Arab League led to the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964 as an umbrella body of several Palestinian factions. The PLO has been representing the State of Palestine at the Arab League since then.
Defence and Security:
While the Arab League as an organisation has no military Force, its members signed a Joint Defence and Economic Co-operation Treaty in 1950 that decided to create the Joint Defence Council of the Arab League to coordinate the joint defence of its member states It also committed members to treat acts of aggression against any member state as an act against all. The provision has been sporadically invoked, last time in 2015 in the initial phase of the Yemen Civil War. However, the Arab League has rarely deployed a peacekeeping force in the various hot spots in the region, curbing the Lebanese Civil War in the 1990s being one of the few examples of such action.
Arab Summits:
A Summit meeting is the highest decision-making body of the Arab League. In the past eighty years of its existence, 40 “ordinary” and 13 “extra-ordinary” (or “emergency”) Arab summits have been held. While a summit can be called for in a routine/periodic manner, its level of participation is often indicative of a prior consensus having been created for the specific issue. For instance, the latest ordinary summit, the 40th, was held in Baghdad on May 17, 2025. It was relatively poorly attended: of the 22 member-states, only 7 were represented at the Head of State level[3], 2 at the Head of Government level; 12 sent their foreign ministers and one was represented by their permanent representative. In the event, the longwinding “Baghdad declaration” released after the event created a Pan-Arab fund for the reconstruction of Gaza and Lebanon, with host Iraq agreeing to contribute $20 million to each. The move was a token response to the Arab opposition to President Trump’s proposal to exile all Gazans to create, “The Riviera in Gaza.” The Baghdad Declaration also articulated near maximalist Arab positions on relevant issues ranging from Israel’s conflicts with Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, civil wars in Sudan and Libya, the establishment of a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East and condemnation of terrorism, particularly from ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Mirage of Arab Unity:
The League of Arab States straddles much of the Middle East and North Africa – a region of strategic and economic importance due to its location, abundance of oil and gas reserves and birthplace of three Semitic religions. Moreover, the region is also home to longstanding tensions, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, Iran-related issues involving nuclear and regional hegemony, ethnic and sectarian divides and motley governance issues. To be more economically specific, the members of the Arab League have a collective population of 462 million and a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion. Yet, their national economies are extremely polarised: Some states such as those belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council are fabulously rich while countries such as Yemen, Sudan and Somalia are among the poorest in the world. Yet, there are only ad-hoc government-to-government transfers of resources largely based on political reasons. The economic activities including trade among the Arab states remain sub-optimal. Socio-politically, too, the Arab world is often in the headlines for the wrong reasons from non-representative misgovernance to intolerance, and fundamentalist terrorism. These lacunae point to both the lost opportunities as well as the unmet challenges that face the Arab world and by implication the Arab League, the only Supra-national body among them.
Historically, too, the concept of “Arab Unity” has a deep resonance among the Arab masses and intellectuals. They draw inspiration from the golden period 7th to 12th century when Arabs were united under Umayyad and Abbasid empires running a vast swath of territories from Andalusia (Spain) to Sindh. They take pride in the cities of Damascus and Baghdad were the global centres of political power, economic wealth and advances in science and technology. They lamented the decline of the Arab civilisation due to various factors such as Arab disunity, Ottoman rule, the Crusades and Western colonisation. The attempts to foster greater Arab unity gained momentum in the later part of the 19th century in tandem with the regional revival movements towards Islamic renewal, modernism and anti-colonialism. However, the campaign remained a sub-critical project due to a lack of cohesion and lack of a pan-Arab leadership. External stimuli, such as British-sponsored rebellion against Ottoman rule during the first world war, Comintern’s calls, and Nazi propaganda against Zionism, were seen as motivated by ulterior considerations and found few Arab takers.
The context around the foundation of the Arab League in 1945 was preceded by signs of Allied victory in WW2 and anticipation of the promised decolonisation as well as moves towards partition of the British mandate of Palestine to create the Jewish state of Israel. Each of the seven independent Arab states realised that it was too weak to influence these two trends and would be better off creating a collective body to do so. The formative years of the Arab League were complicated by the underpinning of two competing political tendencies: Arab Nationalism as championed by Egypt’s charismatic leader Gamal Abdul Nasser and the Arab Ba’ath (Rebirth) Socialist Movement of Syrian political philosopher Michael Aflaq. While both espoused greater Arab unity, they soon fell apart with Cairo and Damascus-Baghdad axes promoting their respective versions of this objective. Further, Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia were opposed to Arab Nationalism’s republican ideology and instead called for Islamic unity as represented by the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) created in 1970. The Egypt-Saudi rivalry spilled over to the Yemeni civil war 91965-69) in which they supported the opposing sides. Ironically, disruptive mass movements such as the “Arab Spring”, al-Qaeda and Islamic State have done more to foster unity among the frightened Arab rulers than any other stimulus.
Israel’s decisive military victory over combined Arab forces in the 1967 war dealt a final blow to the practical aspects of the Arab unity project, even as the concept of the project has its diehard adherents. Even the sub-regional unification projects such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, Arab Maghreb Union, etc. have had limited success.
At the same time, “the Palestine Cause” has continued to be the rallying cry for Arab unity in general and had, willy nilly, become to primordial raison d’etre for the Arab League. At its 2002 Summit, the Arab League adopted the Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Plan to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict based on a two-state solution. While Arab League Summits since have pitched for this formula, Israel has not accepted it.
Assessment of Arab League:
For several reasons, the last few decades have seen only a few examples of successful intergovernmental organisations. Global entities such as the United Nations to the World Trade Organisation have not been able to deliver as expected. Regional bodies such as SAARC to African Union or Organisation of American States have also floundered in delivering sub-optimally. Even worthier examples of the European Union and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) are looking for salience. Several challenging factors have hobbled their performance even as each such case has its specific list. In general, such factors can be divided into two broad categories: External factors range from the Cold War being replaced with complex and unsettled multipolarity, legacy issues from decolonisation, terrorism as a global and regional issue, emergence of new global economic order upending many post-WW2 paradigms, stress on regional collaboration as an antidote to rule-based globalisation, advent of new technologies, deglobalisation impacting on the supply chains and various legacy conflicts from colonial era. Domestic factors, on the other hand, could include non-representative political structure colliding with public aspirations, perceived elitism and corruption, ethnic frictions, socio-economic disparities and foreign meddling.
Judging against the formidable odds faced during its 80-year-long journey, the Arab League has done reasonably well. Firstly, its survival through a tumultuous period is a tribute to both its necessity and resilience. The League has meandered through, often less than elegantly, strong currents of decolonisation, wars, foreign military interventions and mass disruptions such as the Arab Spring, ISIS and al-Qaeda. Secondly, by providing a platform to discuss common issues, it has often helped to garner a more moderate consensus and defuse the incipient conflicts. Thirdly, although its approach to the Palestinian Cause has often been rhetorical, it has helped create an Arab consensus on this definitional issue underpinning the need for a peaceful resolution of this festering crisis. Last, but not the least, the League has been a consistent voice of mainstream Arab discourse away from money and muscle power used by the multiple external and internal pretenders to represent the Arab world.
These “achievements” of the Arab League need squaring against the many infirmities that have often rendered it a dignified debating society. Its inability to effectively address the basic issues confronting the Arab World, such as the Palestine Cause, Camp David Accords (leading to a split in the League itself!), Abraham Accords, Islamic terrorism, various civil wars and better socio-economic integration. Such repeated failures have consistently exposed the Arab League’s limits and underlined its irrelevance. The League has too often averted its eyes from pressing issues fearing that any discussion about them would accentuate the existing divisions. It has also suffered from its members failing to empower it, instead looking at the common and shared issues through the narrow political prism of national interest. Thus, the leaders of rich and powerful member states have preferred to deal with others bilaterally to gain “soft power” rather than going through the League. Moreover, the major foreign powers have also acted to undermine the Arab unity on substantive political and economic issues either by picking up their favourite interlocutors or, resorting to ventriloquism through their Arab proxies. This situation has fed the various “conspiracy theories” about the vested domestic and foreign interests acting in concert to weaken Arab unity, in general, and the Arab League, in particular.
Given the vast expense of the division-prone Arab world and the complexity of the issues facing them, it would be unrealistic to expect the Arab League to be a panacea for all that ails its flock. But at the same time, nothing should have prevented it from picking up the low-lying, non-controversial fruits with potential benefits to the Arab masses. The League could have been an effective conduit for collective actions on poverty alleviation, desertification, healthcare, water stress, logistics, education, and creating common Arab standards for new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, etc. Eight decades on, the absence of such a consensual strategy is a strong indictment of the efficacy of the League of the Arab States.
[1] The founding members were: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine.
[2] The current members are: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia. Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
[3] Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa cancelled his participation after some Iraqi Shia militias opposed his presence due to his ISIS and al-Qaeda background. Syria was represented by its foreign minister.
The previous issue of Sudan Conflict 2.0: From Civil War to a War Among Quasi-States (West Asia & North Africa Digest) are available here: LINK
