Artificially drawn Arab states acquired real solidity through entrenched elites

Evidence

Yet these states, artificial and alien as they may have been, nevertheless ac­ quired reality. Around each one of them there grew up a ganglion of interests, careers and loyalties and, most important of all, a ruling and administering e´lite which made the state an effective unit—unwilling to surrender or share power or control and increasingly conscious of a separate identity and purpose. This was already clear in the disunity of the Arab states invading Palestine in 1948, even at the moment of danger. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 925

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic mechanism by which invented states harden into real ones — parallel to Anderson on imagined communities and the standard critique of the artificiality thesis. — connects to: Most Arab states were artificial creations with invented names; Decolonization produced many new independent Arab states between 1948 and 1967. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 906