To resume earlier main points: the Arab world is imperialistically overdetermined (Avramidis 2006a). Imperialist assault, whether militarily or through value-sapping neoliberal policies, explains much of its underdevelopment. After three decades of sustained aggression, the majority of Arab states are decomposing from within. Deterioration in the quality of health, education and nutrition, along with rising food dependency, among many other social variables, indicate receding national security and, conversely, rising US-led imperialist hegemony. Disintegration, both nationally and regionally, has marked the recent path of Arab history. The actual costs of disintegration to working classes in terms of lost lives and living standards are immense. Counterfactually speaking, the costs of an integrative process could have been lighter and the gains in national security (from which many other forms of security follow) could have been significant. The merchant ruling class, which is innately comprador, deploys the cant of pan-Arab or national integration to placate the working classes while implementing policies that have long caused dissolution. It is important to recall that the class pull of this parish world financial capital on the merchant class in charge of Arab development is stronger than its national commitment.

In this chapter, I argue that sovereignty and industrialisation are requisites for integration around a ‘social contract’ or an egalitarian redistribution-bolstered ass entente within a nation-state, and that they also promote cross-border integration with other working class–bolstered nation-states.