The Formation of the Arab League and the United Nations, 1944–5

Abstract

While the Great Powers were meeting in Washington at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, representatives of the Arab states were meeting in Egypt to draft the Alexandria Protocol, the document that would lead to the establishment of the Arab League in March 1945. The idea of Arab Unity has a long history driven by intra-regional dynamics but the form that the League ultimately took of a regional organization rather than the political union many envisioned was largely a product of the wartime environment. The Arab states found both opportunity and potential threats in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals as they worked to develop their own postwar vision. Discussions of regional councils in the months preceding Dumbarton Oaks raised fears of a western-imposed regional order and served as the center of gravity that ultimately allowed them, for the moment, to overcome regional rivalries and join together in the Arab League. This case study contributes to the decolonization of diplomatic history by placing the Arab nationalist movement in its global context and demonstrates how the Arab states, for whom unity was viewed as a pathway to independence, appropriated wartime internationalist ideals in the later war years.