How Seven Arab States Founded the Arab League in Cairo in March 1945
Yemen Herald News 
The delegates who gathered in Cairo on 22 March 1945 were not founding a state, an army or a customs union. They were signing a short document, the Pact of the League of Arab States, that gave institutional shape to an idea which had circulated among Arab politicians and intellectuals for decades without ever acquiring a permanent address. The ceremony closed a process begun the previous autumn, when representatives meeting in Alexandria adopted the Alexandria Protocol on 7 October 1944 and agreed in principle to establish a league of independent Arab states.
Seven countries are counted as the founding members: the Kingdom of Egypt, the Kingdom of Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Republic, Transjordan and the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. Not all of them put their names to the pact on the same day. The Yemeni government took additional time to consider the text and acceded on 5 May 1945, some six weeks after the Cairo ceremony, which is why some accounts describe six signatures in March and a seventh in the spring. Yemen’s inclusion mattered to the new body’s self-image: it meant the League reached from the Nile valley and the Levant down the length of the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
The pact itself was a modest instrument, and deliberately so. It created a Council in which every member state held a single vote regardless of size or wealth. Decisions taken unanimously bound all members; decisions taken by majority bound only those states that had voted for them. Members undertook to settle disputes among themselves without resort to force and to respect one another’s systems of government, a clause inserted at the insistence of monarchies that had no wish to see republican neighbours meddling in their internal arrangements. The League was, in other words, designed by governments that wanted coordination without any surrender of sovereignty.
Cairo was chosen as the seat of the organisation and a permanent secretariat was established there. The Egyptian diplomat Abdul Rahman Azzam became the first Secretary-General, holding the post from 1945 until 1952 and doing much to define what the office could and could not do. Successive secretaries-general have inherited the same structural problem: the secretariat can convene, draft and mediate, but it cannot compel a member state to act against its own reading of its interests.
An annex to the pact addressed Palestine, which was not then an independent state. The signatories agreed that Palestine should be represented in the League’s work pending independence, an arrangement that placed the question at the centre of Arab regional diplomacy from the organisation’s first days and has kept it there ever since.
Membership expanded steadily as decolonisation advanced. North African states joined on independence during the 1950s and 1960s, Gulf states through the 1970s, and the League today counts twenty-two members. That growth widened its geographic reach considerably but did not resolve the tension written into the founding pact between collective declaration and national prerogative. On the defining crises of the post-war Arab world, the League has more often registered a consensus after the fact than produced one in advance.
Two episodes illustrate how far internal disagreement could go. Egypt—the League’s host, largest member and effective architect—had its membership suspended in 1979 after signing a peace treaty with Israel, and the headquarters were relocated to Tunis. Egypt was readmitted in 1989 and the secretariat returned to Cairo the following year. Syria’s membership was suspended in November 2011 in response to the government’s handling of the uprising there, and was restored in May 2023 after more than a decade of exclusion. In both cases the League proved willing to expel a founding or long-standing member, and in both cases it eventually reversed itself.
Yemen’s relationship with the organisation traces the country’s own political history. The Mutawakkilite Kingdom signed as a founding member in 1945. After southern independence in 1967, the People’s Republic of Southern Yemen took a separate seat, so that for more than two decades two Yemeni states sat in the same Council. Unification in 1990 merged those seats into one. Since the collapse of the political transition that followed the 2011 protests, the League has consistently recognised the internationally recognised government and endorsed the Gulf-brokered frameworks intended to restore it, though its practical influence on the course of the conflict has been limited.
The anniversary of the signing is marked each 22 March, and the commemorations tend to be more ceremonial than substantive. Yet the date is a genuine landmark. Before 1945 there was no standing forum in which Arab governments met as a matter of routine, no permanent secretariat to prepare their agendas, and no agreed procedure for tabling a regional dispute. Afterwards there was.
What the founders built was not a federation and was never intended to be one. It was a conference given permanence: a table, a set of rules for sitting at it, and an address in Cairo. Eighty-one years on, the criticisms levelled at the League—that it declares more than it decides, and decides more than it enforces—are largely criticisms of the design its founders chose in 1945. They were sovereign governments in a region newly emerging from imperial control, and they wrote an instrument that protected that sovereignty above all else.
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