Europe United After Mass Death—Why Were the Arab and Latin Worlds Kept Apart?

By Mohamad Hammoud

How colonial power let Europe unite—and ensured Arabs and Latin Americans never would

The modern world map presents a geopolitical paradox that refuses to go away. Europe—a continent that perfected industrial-scale slaughter, splintered into nearly 287 different languages and rival denominations—now operates under a single integrated framework. Meanwhile, the Arab world and Latin America, bound by shared languages, dominant religions, and overlapping colonial experiences, remain fractured into vulnerable sovereign units. The contrast is not cultural. It is structural—and deeply political.

Europe’s unity did not emerge from harmony. It was born out of fear. After an estimated 187 million people died as a result of war in the 20th century, according to data from the Imperial War Museums, European leaders concluded that unchecked nationalism would lead to collective suicide. As Reuters and the Associated Press documented in postwar reporting, integration was less a moral awakening than a survival mechanism. The European Union was designed to make another continental war materially impossible.

Europe’s Blood-Stained Road to Unity

The Arab and Latin regions never reached the kind of internal breaking point that forced Europe to confront itself. They did not fight continent-wide wars against one another, nor did their borders solidify through mutual exhaustion. Instead, those borders were imposed externally, producing not reconciliation but managed instability rather than shared reckoning.

Europe’s violence is often contrasted with the relative absence of Arab and Latin intra-regional wars, but that framing obscures the decisive fact: Europe was permitted—indeed encouraged—to integrate, while the Arab world and Latin America were systematically prevented from doing so. Their fragmentation was not an accident of history but the outcome of deliberate design.

Borders Drawn to Divide, Not to Govern

The central barrier to unity in both regions is the legacy of colonial “divide and rule.” Colonialism did not merely extract resources; it redesigned political geography. Borders across the Arab world and Latin America were drawn to fracture economies, dilute collective identities, and empower intermediaries aligned with external power. Unlike Europe—where borders were contested internally and later stabilized—these regions inherited boundaries engineered for imperial convenience, not regional coherence.

That architecture did not vanish with independence; it adapted. As Middle East Eye reported in early 2026, “Israel,” operating with unqualified US backing, has actively reinforced Arab fragmentation by legitimizing secessionist projects and breakaway entities. Its recognition of Somaliland in late December 2025—warned against by the UN Security Council as destabilizing—fits a broader strategy of keeping the region divided into weak, competing units incapable of forming a coherent bloc.

Containment as Policy in Latin America

Latin America has faced a parallel constraint under the Monroe Doctrine, long treated in Washington as settled law. The doctrine ensured that regional integration remained a threat rather than a goal. As the Buenos Aires Herald noted in its coverage of U.S. intervention in Venezuela in January 2026, American actions—from coups and sanctions to open regime-change operations—have consistently punished governments that attempted independent coordination. Fragmented exporters are easier to manage than unified producers, locking the region into raw-material dependency rather than collective economic power.

Elite behavior matters here. In postwar Europe, ruling classes accepted limits on sovereignty in exchange for stability and growth. In much of the Arab world and Latin America, elites tied their survival to foreign intelligence, finance, and military backing. Unity endangered their position. Division protected it.

The Graveyard of Aborted Unity

History is littered with failed attempts. The United Arab Republic collapsed under external pressure once it threatened control over strategic arteries like the Suez Canal. Simón Bolívar’s Gran Colombia disintegrated as local elites aligned with foreign interests over regional solidarity. These failures were not the result of cultural deficiency but of geopolitical intolerance.

The absence of Arab–Latin conflict did not produce unity because unity itself was never permitted to mature. Europe integrated because it was strategically useful to American power. The periphery was kept divided because cohesion there would be destabilizing—to empire, to markets, and to elite impunity.

Unity as the Forbidden Outcome

What blocks Arab and Latin unity is not religion, language or history. It is a global order that rewards fragmentation at the margins and coordination at the center. Until that order is confronted—and until local elites sever their dependence on it—shared faith and shared tongues will remain symbols of what might have been, not foundations of what is.