The purpose of this research is to examine attributes of nationalism as applied chiefly to Egypt and Jordan. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which nationalism surfaced as an issue in these countries in the 20th century and then to discuss the dynamics of political governance that lend national identity either organically, from within the relevant population, or because they are imposed from without, as an administrative exercise from an authoritative top down through the population.
What must be appreciated about the issue of nationalism in Egypt and Jordan in the modern period is that both countries' modern political history was shaped in significant part, not so much by persons programmatically identifying themselves as Egyptians--still less Jordanians--as by European powers whose colonial interests dominated the Middle East beginning in the 19th century. The so-called Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of 1898 governed Egyptian and Sudanese territory inherited from the disempowered Ottoman Empire, giving formal structure to a process of encroaching British influence that had begun in 1798. From the British and Ottoman point of view, Egypt and Sudan were more or less unitary, and from the 1880s onward the British Empire gradually used commercial concessions to acquire Egypt as a possession from the Ottomans. As an Ottoman province, Egypt had since 1822 invaded tribal territory below the Blue Nile (Viorst, 1995, p. 48). The British more or less inherited Ottoman disposition of political divisions of the area and gave de facto recognition that Egypt and Britain together controlled the Sudan. The fact is that both Egypt and the Sudan were under British control by occupation, although the character of that control underwent various changes in the first half of the 20th century.
The Jordan case is not wholly unlike that of Egypt, but as far as the big picture is concerned, it differs in two rather cru...