Arab Union

The Union of Arab Republics (UAR; Arabic: إتِّحاد الجمهوريات العربية ittiḥād al-jumhūriyāt al-‘arabīyah), informally known as the Arab Union (الإتِّحاد العربي al-ittiḥād al-‘arabī), is a socialist state in North Africa and Western Asia. Governed as a federation of 20 Arab republics, three Special Economic Zones, and two federally-administered cities (the capital, Baghdad, and Cairo, the country's largest city), the Arab Union covers a vast and diverse area contain open deserts, fertile pastures contrasting green forests, long coastlines dotted with port cities, great metropolitan areas, desert villages, and a majority of sites considered holy by the three Abrahamic faiths of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. With a population of over 455 million people at the end of 2018, it is the third most populous sovereign state in the world, after China and India.

The Arab Union was established in 1994 following a three-year war, which pitted pan-Arabist forces led by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party against an array of nationalist and Islamist armed groups backed by conservative regional Arab states, the former ultimately emerging victorious and proclaiming a united federal republic in its territory. A majority of formerly sovereign Arab governments became federated states subordinate to a new federal authority, which nationalised a majority of the economy in the immediate postwar years, ultimately allowing private enterprise on a large scale only in the three Special Economic Zones established in 1996, 1997 and 1999. The Pan-Arab Army, renamed the Arab Union Armed Forces, took control of the remaining military infrastructure in the new federation, and a National Guard was established to take command of all militia formations in the country. By the new millennium, the Arab Union had passed from the postwar reconstruction phase to a new phase marked by rapid industrial development and internal and late, external economic integration.

Today, the Arab Union is the second-largest economy and one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Its military commands the second-largest standing army and the largest reserve force in the world, and is estimated to have the world's third-highest level of military expenditures. It has invested heavily in infrastructure in the past decade, boasting a large expressway network connecting all major and most smaller cities in the federation, as well as a complex system of passenger and freight rail transport. The Arab Union is nominally a semi-presidential socialist republic, with a de facto dominant-party system in which the founding and ruling Ba'ath Party exerts disproportionate influence over national and regional politics, with other major parties legally allied to the ruling party as part of the National Progressive Front. Only those opposition parties which endorse Arab federalism are permitted to exist and contest elections, but have difficulty campaigning due to the state monopoly on print and electronic media. The government curtails some civil rights with respect to free speech and freedom of assembly, and routinely censors internet activity, with many regionalist nationalist or Islamist sites and foreign sites blocked either intermittently or permanently. In contrast, the legal system strictly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexuality, and promotes secularism and women's equality.