This month of May marks the centennial anniversary of the portentous Asia Minor Agreement, popularly known as Sykes-Picot Agreement — so named after its two signatories, British Mark Sykes and Frenchman Francois Georges-Picot. More importantly, however, the Agreement has gained notoriety because it allegedly had split the Arab lands into states in accordance with imperial designs, machinations, and vagaries. The contemporary state of tumult in the Middle East hails from this infamous accord.
Nowadays, a debate is raging in western academic and media circles on the emergence of a new Middle East and the end of the Sykes-Picot legacy. People who make such an argument point to the crisis in Syria and the implosion of the country into motley statelets controlling different swathes of territories. Iraq is haplessly drifting to dismemberment into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish states. Lebanon’s fractured politics may lead to eventual fragmentation. Yemen splitting into different states in the south and the north is only a matter of time. Libya’s once-brittle political system under the late Muammar Gaddafi is now in tatters.
The political justification for such redrawing of the Middle East map is that European colonialists delineated countries with no justice to ethnic or sectarian realities. The debate was triggered by Army Lt Col (retd) Ralph Peters in the June 2006 issue of the Armed Forces Journal. In his Blood Borders, Peters suggested that a “reimagining of Middle Eastern and Asian borders along ethnic, sectarian and tribal lines might ease regional tensions. The article and the accompanying map were — and continue to be — widely taken as Washington’s blueprint for imperial meddling”.
The problem is that the historiography of the whole episode is dubious, if not outright wacky. Arab nationalists feel the source of the divisions in the Arab states has its roots in imperial designs and the Sykes-Picot agreement in particular. Few will dispute that western intervention, including the most recent adventure in Iraq, is a too clever and mostly unmitigated disaster, particularly for the Palestinians who have long suffered ethnic cleansing, dispossession and prolonged exile. But to argue that Arab states have been unmoored into troubled waters by the Sykes-Picot agreement is baseless, to put it mildly.
To start with, the Sykes-Picot agreement was about distribution of spheres of influence among Britain, France and Russia, not about drawing boundaries, as Gregory Gause pointed out, “but the final borders were determined by the two powers at the San Remo conference in 1920”. That most of the Arab states’ boundaries were drawn by colonial powers is beyond dispute. But to claim that the origins of these states are the consequence of Sykes-Picot or any other crafty imperial schemes and foreign intrigues flies in the face of history.
All-encompassing identity
The late Lebanese-American professor Ilya Harik contends, with much evidence, that the Arab states are largely the product of regional and indigenous forces and “mostly unrelated to European colonialism and in most cases predates it”. Admittedly, these Arab countries, with few exceptions, do not constitute a nation-state; and Arab states either officially or unofficially allude to a larger “umma” or nation as the all-encompassing identity of their states. Ideological conviction does not contradict the claim that the Arab states are not in every case the creature of colonial powers.
Close to home, the Arab Gulf polities established themselves as early as the 18th century before the US gained independence and Britain turned to the Gulf region. In fact, it was expansion of the state power of the Qawasim that provoked the British colonial onslaught in the region. Likewise, at next door Saudi Arabia, the state emerged in around the same time. Yemen had come under the rule of the Imam in the north and assorted sultans in the south. The south, after a long independence, was eventually subjected to British domination as a crown colony in Aden and protectorates in the rest of the country.
Far away in the Maghreb, the Alaouite dynasty established a centralised state by the 17th century, long before the advent of French rule. The Beylik of Tunis was founded as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire in 1705, under the Husainid Dynasty, only to succumb to French domination in 1881. Algeria and Libya drifted away from Ottoman rule and became independent polities long before the European conquest.
Evidence is aplenty that the origins of modern Arab states lie in this region and the Sykes-Picot agreement only applies to the specific region of the Fertile Crescent, i.e. Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. It is one thing to say that the borders of all Arab states were drawn by colonial powers — and largely arbitrarily, much to the detriment of indigenous interests — but it is quite another to contend that all political entities that have evolved into states are colonial creations.
What Harik and others often forget is that European colonial powers undermined the one serious effort by Arabs to create a powerful state with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. In this sense, Sykes-Picot is the culprit. One has to take note of what the late Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, wrote: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”
Dr Al Badr Al Shateri is a UAE political analyst and writer.
