Using Arabic, English, and French sources, and engaging Middle East and Cold War historians, this article makes a threefold argument. First, in United Arab Republic (UAR)-Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, the 1958-59 explosion of domestic and regional tensions triggered state-formation surges. Second, these formed one process, which made those states more alike, with state-led socioeconomic planning playing a key role. Third, that process partook of a global Third World trend intersecting with the early Cold War. I draw three conclusions. Although existing scholarly readings that the events of 1958-59 in the Arab Middle East formed a crisis but not an ideological or political watershed are correct, from the viewpoint of state formation this crisis was a milestone. Moreover, UAR-Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had persisting affinities and shared regional positions-notably, the fact that all were sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt-that shaped their individual postindependence histories of state formation. Last, Washington's low-profile involvement in this state-formation surge illustrates how domestic sociopolitics and regional geopolitics-including the UAR's peaking popularity and influence in 1958-59-affected U.S. policy in the Cold War postcolonial world.
IN FEBRUARY 1935, A DAMASCUS-BASED French intelligence officer reported a plan by smugglers from Aleppo to transport 188 kilograms of hashish from Turkish Aintab to their Syrian hometown. From there, the suspects intended to take the drugs by car to Lebanon's capital, Beirut. Once the contraband had arrived, an accomplice was to place a telephone call to the Palestinian port city of Haifa to ask a drug smuggler, Abud Yasin, to come to Lebanon and arrange for it to be shipped via Palestine to Egypt. The plan failed; Yasin, however, reappeared. In December 1938, he was suspected of having paid a ship's captain in Tyre to smuggle 31 kilograms of hashish and 17 kilograms of opium to Palestine. In February 1940, he was leading a drug-smuggling ring operating between Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt. The Syrian police intercepted him on a night trip from Aleppo to Zahle, in the eastern Lebanese Bekaa Valley. When he and an accomplice tried to escape in their truck, the police opened fire. Yasin survived and was convicted of smuggling 254 kilograms of opium and hashish. In 1944, he was reportedly trafficking hashish from Zahle via the southern Lebanese border village of Rmeiche to Palestine and from there to Egypt. 1 Yasin's life was adventurous, but not exceptional. In the post-Ottoman Levant, a wide range of people were involved in what officials called "smuggling" across and beyond the borders of the new states of French Mandatory Lebanon (1918/1920-This article is part of a book project interpreting the regional history of the Levant, 1918-1948. Different versions have been presented at Princeton University, the 2009 Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference, and the University of Texas at Austin. I have profited immensely from, and gratefully acknowledge, the help of Firas Talhuk and Yusri Khizaran; from incisive critique by Naghmeh Sohrabi,
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