How the Arab State Re-engineered politics through communism. By Zakaria Nimer

  How the Arab State Re-engineered politics through communism.

By Zakaria Nimer
June 12, 2026
Confronting communism in the Arab world was not, in essence, an intellectual struggle between competing ideologies but rather a political process of reshaping the public sphere by inventing a broad and flexible concept of internal enemy. A common misconception in reading about this phenomenon is to believe that the Arab state confronted communism as a specific idea that could be critiqued or refuted, when in fact communism gradually morphed into a blanket category used to subsume all forms of dissent under a single label. This shift was neither accidental nor the result of a theoretical misunderstanding, but rather part of a governance logic that reduced political pluralism rather than managed it.
Communism becomes less important as an idea and more important as a function. Its primary function was not to describe Marxism or leftist organizations, but to provide a ready-made name by which different currents could be integrated into a single threat field. This meant that the state was not confronting communism so much as it was redefining it in a way that allowed political exclusion to expand. The broader this definition is, the smaller the space for possible policy. Communism no longer refers to an economic system or social theory, but has become synonymous with any discourse that does not integrate into the existing power structure.
This expansion of the definition was not just a linguistic deviation but a technique of judgment. A state without strong political institutions capable of accommodating pluralism tends to replace politics with security. In this model, politics becomes not an arena that competes with programs, but rather a field of risk management. Any difference is not read as a legitimate difference, but as an indication of a threat. In this sense, the political sphere is being transformed into an arena of control and classification rather than one of debate and conflict. The problem was not only with communism but with any project that could redefine the state outside its existing monopoly. Therefore, secularism and Nasserism were introduced into the same taxonomic field, despite their radical differences. Secularism is not an economic position or a party organization, but rather a redefinition of the source of political legitimacy, shifting it from religion to law and institutions. But this shift directly touches on the symbolic structure on which the traditional state is based, so it has been treated as a potential extension of the same leftist threat.
Nasserism, on the other hand, was more complicated because it was not just an intellectual discourse but a whole state project. This project relied on the state’s centrality in the economy and politics, and on the reshaping of society through strong institutional tools. This makes it, from the perspective of the existing state, a direct competitor to the state’s own definition. Not because it is communist, but because it produces an alternative model of monopolizing power. Therefore, they were dealt with under the same threat logic, even though they differed from communism in theory and organization. The problem is not the similarity between these projects, but the forcible integration of them. The state was less interested in the accuracy of the classification than in reducing the number of political actors. Therefore, everything that is leftist, critical, or reformist has been reduced to a single broad field that can be managed from a security perspective. This fusion has led to the loss of theoretical differences between currents that are virtually united by nothing but being outside of power. Thus, multi-mindedness was transformed into a single bloc that could be treated as a unified threat. But this transformation would not have been complete without the contribution of these same currents. Leftist, nationalist, and secular elites have in many cases failed to produce clear theoretical and institutional boundaries between them. There was an overlap among socialism and nationalism, the state project and party organization, and political thought and authoritarian practice. This overlap was not just intellectual diversity but the absence of a stable conceptual structure. This lack of boundaries made reclassification much easier, because the authority did not need to invent ambiguity but only to exploit it. In parallel, the security state expanded as a comprehensive framework for managing the political sphere. With this expansion, it became difficult to distinguish between political opposition and intellectual or social activism. All of these forms began to be read by a single criterion: the degree of proximity or distance to authority. Politics has thus shifted from a pluralistic space to a vertical classification system based on loyalty and threat. In this system, the question is no longer what the opposition wants, but whether it is safe or dangerous.
This shift has had a profound impact on the structure of the public sphere. Rather than developing into a conflict between different visions of the state and society, politics has become a process of mutual cancellation. Any project that does not fully integrate into power is pushed outside the political sphere. Over time, there is no longer a real political center. Still, only two parties: a power that monopolizes definition, and everything outside it is redefined as a potential danger. The end result of this process is not only the decline of communism, secularism, or Nasserism, but the shrinking of politics itself as an independent space. When every difference is turned into a threat, it becomes impossible to produce politics in the true sense. Politics assumes the existence of a legitimate adversary, whereas the logic of securitization assumes a risk that must be managed or eliminated. This contradiction is at the heart of the crisis. What happened was not just the defeat of a particular ideology, but a complete re-engineering of the meaning of politics. In this sense, not only did the state triumph over communism, but also the idea that the political sphere could be managed without true pluralism triumphed. This is the deeper transformation: replacing politics as a programmatic conflict with politics as threat management.
The problem is not in the ideas that have been excluded, but in the mechanism by which they have been excluded. Because the same mechanism can be used against any other project, no matter how different or moderate it is. This means that the real danger lies not in communism, secularism, or Nasserism, but in the policy-management model itself, which treats pluralism as a threat rather than a natural condition of political life. The Arab experience in this context can be understood as a long road to redefining politics itself. The goal was not to build a pluralistic space but to gradually reduce it by expanding the concept of threat. With each expansion, the political sphere narrowed one step further until the difference itself became unrecognizable. This is the essence of the crisis that continues to affect the structure of politics today.