THE POST-OTTOMAN SYNDROME
Avi Shlaim
MUCH OF THE MIDDLE EAST has been living with a chronic condition for almost a century which I term the post-Ottoman syndrome. Its symptoms are turmoil, instability and a deficit of rights for the peoples of the region. A major cause is the lack of legitimacy of the new political and territorial order that emerged in the wake of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. That state system, in the lands formerly controlled by the Ottomans, was largely the creation of colonial powers and designed to serve their interests.
In the course of the First World War, the Entente powers, Britain and France, made various secret plans for dividing the lands of the Ottoman Empire in the event of victory. Behind France’s back, Britain promised a share of the spoils to its Arab allies to induce them to take up arms against their Ottoman overlords. Towards the end of the war Britain made public promises to support the Zionist project in Palestine which were incompatible with its earlier undertakings. To make sense of the tangled and tortuous diplomacy behind these contradictory promises, it is therefore necessary to examine not only the relations between the two colonial powers but also their relations with their respective local allies.
Wartime diplomacy was further complicated by mutual mistrust between the two colonial powers. The French called Britain ‘perfidious Albion’, based on its long record of deviousness and double-dealing. Britain did indeed act in a selfish manner, but there was nothing unusual in that: selfishness is in the DNA of colonial powers. France too was not exactly a paragon of virtue. My aim here is not to dwell on wartime diplomacy, fascinating as it is, but to spell out its consequences for the post-war regional order. My main emphasis will be on the borders set by the colonial powers and on the successor states they created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. To be sure, wartime partition plans were rather like drawing ‘lines in the sand’. The bargaining power of each of the participants kept changing in line with its fluctuating fortunes on the battlefield. But the international borders that the victors set after the war have lasted down to the present day, with the exception of Israel–Palestine. They have proved to be remarkably stable, almost sacrosanct – perhaps the only stable element in a volatile region. The way in which these borders emerged is therefore not merely of historical interest; it is a crucial element in the remaking of the modern Middle East.
In the course of searching for allies against the Ottoman Turks, the British made a number of promises, some of them secret and some open. The three most important promises were to the Arabs, the French and the Jews. First, in an effort to foster an anti-Turkish rebellion in the Arab lands, Britain entered into secret negotiations with Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, whose descendants later became the kings of Jordan. The Hashemites claimed direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad and were hereditary guardians of the Holy Places in Mecca and Medina in their ancestral home in the Hijaz in Western Arabia, but they were also nominal vassals of the Ottoman Sultan. Conspiring with infidels against a Muslim overlord was quite a risky undertaking for the conservative Sharif, hence the need for secrecy. Between July 1915 and March 1916 ten letters were exchanged between the Sharif and Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt. In these letters Britain promised the Sharif to recognise and support an independent Arab kingdom under his leadership after the war in return for taking up arms against the Ottomans. The British promise was vaguely worded, imprecise about borders and failed to make clear whether Palestine was to be included in the Arab kingdom.
Vague as they were, Britain’s assurances led to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt against the Turks in June 1916. As its origins make all too clear, the Arab Revolt, which is remembered to this day as the golden age of Arab nationalism, was in essence an Anglo-Hashemite plot, an unholy alliance against the Ottoman Sublime Porte. Britain financed the Arab Revolt as well as supplying arms, provisions, artillery support and experts in desert warfare, among whom was the legendary T. E. Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The Hashemites promised much more than they were able to deliver, and the military value of the revolt was modest; indeed, Lawrence’s account greatly exaggerated its military successes.1
Second, Britain reached a secret understanding with France in May 1916, the Sykes–Picot Agreement, discussed by James Barr in this volume and covered in fascinating detail in his book A Line in the Sand (2011). The two officials drafted a plan to divide the land between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf into two ‘spheres of influence’ in the event of victory. No agreement could be reached on Palestine, so the compromise solution was to place it under an international regime.
Future historians would cite the Sykes–Picot Agreement as a prime example of imperial perfidy. Palestinian historian George Antonius denounced it as ‘a shocking document’ and ‘a startling piece of doubledealing’.2 The perfidy is undeniable, but its consequences have often been exaggerated. It is a common misconception – shared by, among others, the Islamic State today – to think that the Sykes–Picot Agreement fixed the borders of the modern Middle East. In fact, it bears little resemblance to the borders that were settled by the League of Nations at the conference of San Remo in 1920. Instead, Sykes–Picot is significant as the beginning of the process of colonial division of the region.
The third and most famous British undertaking, again vaguely worded and imprecise but this time not secret, was the promise contained in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. At that time the Jews made up barely 10 per cent of the population of Palestine. Supporting their national rights in Palestine meant denying them to the Arab majority. Balfour’s declaration was thus a classic colonial document. The main motive behind it was less to support the fledgling Zionist movement than to harness the perceived influence of world Jewry to the British war effort. The prime mover behind the declaration was David Lloyd George, who became prime minister in December 1916. His support for Zionism was based on a huge overestimate of Jewish influence. In aligning Britain with the Zionist movement, he acted in the mistaken – and anti-Semitic – view that the Jews turned the wheels of history. In fact, the Jewish people had little influence other than the myth of clandestine power. Issuing the Balfour Declaration turned out to be one of the most colossal blunders in British imperial history. It brought Britain much ill will in the Arab world and no corresponding benefits, not even the gratitude of its Jewish protégés.
British policymakers had no clear idea as to how they would reconcile the promises they made to the Arabs, the French and the Zionists. Consequently, there was confusion as well as duplicity in Britain’s policy towards its wartime allies. Furthermore, as the war progressed, the British policymakers became more acquisitive. Lenin said that imperialism causes war. In Britain’s case, it was the war that fuelled imperialism. Lloyd George wanted to grab more and more Ottoman territory, regardless of the agreements entered into by his predecessors. His aim was to establish British hegemony in the Middle East, to gain access to its oil fields and to bring Palestine into the British sphere of influence.
Lloyd George’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East went against the current of American anti-colonialism, which was running high with Woodrow Wilson as president. The President’s high-minded attitude to politics, enunciated in his Fourteen Points, denounced secret diplomacy and upheld the right of small nations to self-determination. America entered the war in April 1917, a month after the Bolshevik revolution put Russia hors de combat, and there was a short period of intense involvement in the affairs of the Middle East before lapsing once again into isolation. Woodrow Wilson knew that the European powers had entered into secret agreements to aggrandise their empires and he did not want his country to be associated with a war that served imperial interests. He wanted a war to end all wars by basing the post-war order on the right to national self-determination. Naturally, some Middle Easterners associated Wilson’s Fourteen Points with their own aspiration to achieve freedom from European domination and welcomed the arrival of the anti-imperialist power as a participant in Middle East politics.
Feeling on the defensive, Britain and France issued a joint declaration on 7 November 1918, a few days before the Armistice, in which they clearly recognised the Arab right to self-determination. The declaration opened with a statement of breathtaking insincerity:
The end which France and Great Britain have in view in their prosecution in the East of the war let loose by German ambition is the complete and definitive liberation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national Governments and Administrations drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of indigenous populations.
It ended on a self-righteous note, denying any wish to impose their own system, promising to respect the will of the people and to secure impartial and equal justice for all.
One searches in vain for any trace of these lofty ideals in the conduct of the European statesmen at the peace conference that convened in Paris in January 1919. It was not the rights of small nations but the rivalries and clashes of the big powers that dominated proceedings. Lloyd George wanted to bring America into the Middle East as Britain’s ally and even suggested that America should have responsibility for Constantinople and Armenia, which had originally been assigned to tsarist Russia. Wilson, however, resisted all of the arrangements proposed by the European powers, suggesting instead an investigating commission to ascertain the desires of the people in the area. The clash between Lloyd George’s old-fashioned imperialism and Woodrow Wilson’s ineffectual idealism ensured that the peace negotiations went from bad to worse.
The Arabs were represented at the peace conference by Emir Faisal, Sharif Hussein’s son, who had formed a temporary administration in Syria but was out of his depth in the world of European diplomacy and eventually left Paris empty-handed. Faisal and his nationalist followers pinned their hopes on American help in their struggle for independence. These hopes were strongly articulated in the resolutions of the General Syrian Congress, which assembled in Damascus on 2 July 1919. ‘We rely,’ said the delegates, ‘on President Wilson’s declaration that his object in entering the War was to put an end to acquisitive designs for imperialistic purposes.’ They demanded the repudiation of the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration; the recognition of Syria, including Palestine, as a sovereign state with Emir Faisal as king; and the granting of independence to Iraq. In conclusion, the delegates affirmed their belief that the settlement should reflect the real wishes of the people and looked to ‘President Wilson and the liberal American nation, who are known for their sincere and generous sympathy with the aspirations of weak nations, for help in the fulfilment of our hopes’.
President Wilson did try to help by sending to Palestine and Syria a commission of inquiry to find out the wishes of the inhabitants. But the King–Crane Commission was a purely American affair, since France and Britain declined to participate in this exercise. The commissioners reported general opposition to Zionism and to the imposition of a French mandate. They also made recommendations for Syria, Palestine and Iraq that were designed to lead to independence at the earliest possible date. But the work of the commission was an exercise in futility. What Woodrow Wilson failed to understand was that consultation is a purely academic exercise − academic in the sense of futile − unless the consulting body has the authority and the will to act on what it learns.
By the end of 1919 Woodrow Wilson had had enough of what he described as ‘the whole disgusting scramble’ and sailed back to the United States, turning over his Arab admirers to the tender mercies of the colonial powers. When the high-sounding Supreme Council of the Peace Conference met in San Remo in April 1920, it brushed aside all Arab claims and the wishes of the inhabitants and reached a settlement that satisfied only the victors. It was fundamentally a victors’ peace. Britain received a League of Nations mandate for Iraq and Palestine which included Transjordan. France received a mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. Mandates were imperialism by other means.
In Arab eyes the San Remo decisions were nothing but a betrayal and a profound humiliation. They sealed the fate of the United Kingdom of Syria, which had been proclaimed by the Greater Syrian Congress on 7 March 1920, with Faisal on the throne. In July 1920 French forces marched on Damascus, banished Faisal into exile and took over the government of the country. Thus was created the modern state of Syria, under French control and on the ruins of the dream of a united and independent Arab kingdom led by the Hashemites.
The French were no friends of Arab nationalism, viewing the Arab Revolt as Britain in Arab headgear. France’s traditional friends were the different Christian sects, and especially the Maronites, who formed the large majority of the population in Mount Lebanon, and on 31 August 1920 the French created yet another state with new borders, issuing a decree establishing the state of Greater Lebanon.
The settlement imposed on the Arab countries by the allies provoked deep resentment throughout the region and this expressed itself in acts of defiance and violence: 1920 saw trouble in Egypt, serious disturbances in Syria, riots in Palestine and a full-scale uprising in Iraq. All these rebellions had their roots not in a sinister Bolshevik conspiracy, as many Britons believed at the time, but in a local dislike of foreigners and foreign domination, buttressed by Muslim resistance to having Christian powers rule over them. Britain’s instinctive reaction as an imperial power was to stamp out the violence, but it was also realised that the lid could not be kept indefinitely on the Middle East cauldron by military repression pure and simple.
The task of formulating a policy fell to Winston Churchill when he became Colonial Secretary in February 1919. His principal adviser was T. E. Lawrence, an advocate of indirect rule or enlightened imperialism. It was under Lawrence’s influence that Churchill adopted the ‘Sharifian’ plan of dividing the British sphere of influence into a number of states to be headed by the Sharif of Mecca and his sons. Lawrence pressed hardest the claims of Emir Faisal. The Sharifian plan went some way towards mitigating Britain’s sense of guilt for letting down the Sharif, but it had two other, more practical, merits to recommend it. First, as Lawrence pointed out, as imported rulers lacking a power base of their own, the Hashemites would be dependent on Britain. Second, as Churchill pointed out, because they were a family, Britain would be able to play them off against one another to attain its own ends.
The first step in implementing this Sharifian plan was to offer Faisal the throne of Iraq. The invention of the Iraqi throne provided a neat solution to Britain’s own problem of carrying a spare prince. It also entailed a handsome consolation prize to the prince in question for the throne he had lost in Damascus. Faisal’s ascent to the throne in Baghdad was carefully stage-managed by Sir Percy Cox, the high commissioner for Iraq, and his assistant Gertrude Bell, whose obsession with the Hashemites and passion for king-making matched that of Lawrence. Other candidates were persuaded to withdraw, while Sayyid Talib, who proclaimed the slogan ‘Iraq for the Iraqis’, was arrested and deported. The remaining opposition to Faisal, mostly from the Kurds and the Shiites, was neutralised. A referendum was then arranged to give Britain’s candidate a veneer of popular legitimacy. Ninety-six per cent of Iraqis, it was claimed, wanted Faisal as their king, and he duly ascended the throne on 23 August 1921. As one critic of British policy noted, the 1921 settlement had two notable results: first, it introduced anti-British sentiment as a fundamental principle of Iraqi politics and, second, ‘it justified and sanctioned violent and arbitrary proceedings and built them into the structure of Iraqi politics’.3
Equally arbitrary and equally calculated to suit Britain’s own political, strategic and commercial interests was the delineation of Iraq’s borders. These took little account of the divisions within Iraq along linguistic or religious lines into Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the centre and Shiite Muslims in the south. The logic behind the enterprise was not easy to fathom. To one observer it seemed that ‘Iraq was created by Churchill, who had the mad idea of joining two widely separated oil wells, Kirkuk and Mosul, by uniting three widely separated peoples: the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites.’4
The second stage in the execution of the Sharifian plan was to let Faisal’s elder brother, Abdullah, rule over the vacant lot which the British christened, if that is the right word, the Emirate of Transjordan, bolstered by financial assistance from Britain. A statement was issued excluding Transjordan from the provisions for a Jewish national home, which initially applied to the whole area of the Palestine mandate. Churchill was well satisfied with his handiwork and frequently boasted that he had created the Emirate of Transjordan by the stroke of his pen one bright Sunday afternoon and still had time to paint the magnificent views of Jerusalem.
The fiercest Arab hostility towards Britain was provoked by the latter’s policy in Palestine. On 1 July 1921 Britain set up a civil administration headed by a high commissioner to govern the country directly. The promise to support a national home for the Jewish people contained in the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the terms of the League of Nations mandate. At the time of the Balfour Declaration the Jews constituted less than 10 per cent of the population of the country. So from the very start a tragic contradiction was built into the mandate: Britain could only meet its obligations to the Jews by denying to the Arab majority their natural right to self-determination. Palestine was to be the exception to the universally valid rule that a territory belongs to the majority of the people who live there.
Moreover, the enthusiasm with which Britain embraced the Zionist cause in 1917 had largely evaporated by the early 1920s. The conflicting promises, statements and declarations made by the allies regarding Palestine created a smokescreen of almost impenetrable density. One of the very few honest remarks on the subject was made in retrospect by the author of the Balfour Declaration. ‘In short, so far as Palestine is concerned,’ wrote Balfour, ‘the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.’5
In the conduct of negotiations over borders, British representatives were capable of acting in a most arbitrary and autocratic manner to further Britain’s imperial interests. During the negotiations in 1922 to define the frontiers of Iraq, Kuwait and the Najd (the forerunner of present-day Saudi Arabia), for example, Sir Percy Cox reprimanded Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Rahman al Faisal al Saud, the mighty Sultan of the Najd, like a naughty schoolboy and reduced him to tears. Ibn Saud was forced to yield land to Iraq but was later compensated at the expense of Kuwait. The borders imposed by Cox, who was known to the Arabs as Kokkus, deliberately restricted Iraq’s access to the Persian Gulf. These borders did not fully satisfy any of the parties, least of all Iraq, which felt it was entitled to the whole of Kuwait. They therefore continued to generate friction and instability.
What was left of the Ottoman Empire after the allies had nearly finished carving it up became the modern state of Turkey. The collapse of empires invariably has consequences for international order and so it was in this case. The Ottoman Empire had provided a political system that was far from perfect, but it worked. During the First World War Britain and France destroyed the old order in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, but they did not spare much thought for the long-term consequences of their actions. In the aftermath of the war they built a new political and territorial order in the region on the ruins of the old order. They refashioned the Middle East in their own image. They created states, they nominated persons to govern them and they laid down frontiers between them. But the new states, for the most part, were small and unstable and the rulers lacked legitimacy, while the frontiers were arbitrary, illogical and unjust, giving rise to powerful irredentist tendencies.
The new order settled Europe’s century-long Eastern Question: who and what would succeed the Ottomans? But it also raised a new Middle Eastern Question within the Middle East itself, and that was whether the people of the region would accept the new state system, which was based on European ideas, European interests and European management. Would they be able and, if so, would they be willing to operate by the new ground rules? The answer is that powerful local forces, both secular and religious, rejected the new state system and the ground rules that went with it. Indeed, it has been this absence of legitimacy that has been a central feature of Middle East politics ever since the old order was blown away.
To Arab nationalists the new order meant betrayal by the allies of their wartime promises, military occupation, the division of the area into spheres of influence and exploitation of its raw materials. Hostility towards the authors of the new order was further fuelled by what they saw as the planting in Palestine, in the heart of the Arab world, of a dangerous imperialist bridgehead in the form of the Jewish national home.
In short, the post-war order imposed by the Entente powers created a belt of turmoil and instability stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Its key feature was lack of legitimacy. This situation may be termed the post-Ottoman syndrome. It laid the groundwork for conflicts that continue to plague the region. In this sense the Paris peace settlement is not just a chapter in history, or past history as Americans are apt to say. It is the story of our own times. It lies at the root of the turmoil and instability, countless territorial disputes, struggles for national liberation, rebellions and revolutions, civil wars and interstate wars that have become such familiar features of the international politics of the Middle East in the post-Second World War era. The post-1918 peace settlement is at the very heart of the current conflicts between the Arabs and Israel, between Arabs and other Arabs, between some Arabs and the West. Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell, who served in the Palestine campaign during the First World War, summed it up in one line: ‘After “the war to end war” they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a “Peace to end Peace”.’6