Hardly is it possible to find a region in the world that would have such complicated history as the Middle East has. Due to a broad array of reasons that include sectarian nature of conflicts, religion in general, beneficial geopolitical position as well as protracted subjection to great world powers are just a few of them. Moreover, even now, when the region is fully independent and coherent it still remains one of the most turbulent places in the world in which literally every state is engulfed in a conflict, religious war or territorial dispute. In this paper I am going to analyze how the post-World War I developments and the Cold War developments were different in how they influenced politics in the Middle East and how they helped shape the region as we know it today.
My thesis statement is that whereas in the post-World War period the Middle East was more of an object of international relations, in the Cold War era it became a full-fledged subject of world affairs. However, I will also try to show that even in the Cold War era the states in the region did not fully avoid the influence of the great powers, but this time not in the context of colonialism but in the context of the USA-USSR standoff.
Broadly speaking, in the first place I am going to concentrate on what plans and ambitions great powers had as per the region of the Middle East, how it happened so that they actually managed to implement their plans as well as legal mechanism which they used to organize their intrusion in the affairs of the Middle East (i.e. the mandate system). In the following part I am going to touch upon the process of disintegration of several empires and how this influenced the map of the region. Subsequently, I am going to touch upon how the Cold War circumstances added up to confrontations in the Middle East. Palestinian-Israeli conflict will become another topic.
In fact, I am profoundly convinced that we can speak about the influence of the World War I on the Middle East even before the war itself ended. There were several documents adopted in 1915 and 1916 that already declared the profound interest great powers – primarily Great Britain, France and Russia – had in relation to the region. The first among these is the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. The first was British High Commissioner in Cairo, the second – governor of Mecca. Their correspondence in July 1915 tells us that Arabs agreed to make a revolt against Osmans (since most Arabic territories were under the Osman Empire) which would help the Western powers in making their belligerent counterpart weaker whereas Great Britain promised Hussein to recognize an Arabic state once it would be created in the wake of the revolt. What we should be interested most in this document is reservations which were propounded by the British party and which eventually became the reason why the formal agreement was never reached. After the Arabic state would be created Great Britain wanted to represent the newly-emerged state in international processes and to establish posts of counselors and other officers in the government of Arabs. This would make the new state, in fact, an autonomy. Another document is the Sykes-Picot agreement which, by the way, actually meant betrayal on the part of Great Britain towards Arabs. This agreement concluded on May 16, 1916 was hush-hush and meant to divide areas of influence between the great powers. Great Britain claimed its interest in the territories that are today Iraq, Palestine, Israel and Jordan whereas France claimed Syria, Lebanon and southern part of Turkey. Russia wanted to influence the far-eastern part of the country.
Finally, the third document that, on the one hand, reaffirmed the mentioned claims of the great powers and, on the other, made their implementation legally possible became the Sevres treaty, the one concluded in 1920 between the Osman Empire and the winners of the World War I. According to this treaty the Empire (which no longer meant to be an empire) gave up on the most of its territories which were at the very same moment claimed by Great Britain and France. The latter, together with Italy, reached their goal through conference at San-Remo here the mandate system was introduced. An instrument was invented under the umbrella of the League of Nations which let the great powers govern or protect (depending on the class of the mandate) the former Osman Empire territories. Later on, these territories were incorporated in the empires themselves which I think became a further display of the fact that Empires had their own geopolitical views in the region did not presume the existence of fully independent subjects. For instance, let us take the Westminster Charter adopted by the British parliament that outlined the conditions on which territories were incorporated in the Empire (Pierce, 2009).
Therefore, we can see that in the inter-bellum period Middle Eastern territories really were not subjects but objects of international relations.
The situation changed though after the Second World War. The British and French Empire began to destruct which led to the declaration of independence by many Middle Eastern states, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Jordan and some others. Formal independence gave much in terms of international recognition. But there are two problems that can be outlined, in my opinion, in this region in this period. First of all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is the factor that managed to unite much of the Arabic world in the face of the common foe – Israel (Trentin, 2012). However, everything was not that simple. When the Cold War was launched the Middle East became a region of bifurcation of the US and the USSR influence as their respective interests overlapped in the region. The United States supported Israel, though there were periods when it was friends with, say, Egypt. The USSR, on the contrary, was very consistent – it supported Arabic states, primarily Egypt and Syria, financially and militarily (Trentin, 2012). However, I think that this penetration was not even close as offensive as the former colonial oppressive penetration. There are several reasons for that, I think. First of all, in the Cold War era we speak about the influence of the countries other than those that would be interested in the restoration of their imperial influence – Great Britain and France had withdrawn from the region in the times of the Suez crisis in 1956. Secondly, independence and unity in the face of Israeli danger made the region so coherent that even sectarian conflicts (with the exception of Iran, perhaps) did not divide countries that much. The fact that, say, Egypt, Jordan and Syria were one country in 1968-1971, is yet another clue for that.
Bibliography
Pierce, David. (2009). “Decolonization and the Collapse of British Empire”. Student Pulse.
“Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, to 1930.” (N.d. ). Macro-history and World Timeline. Retrieved at: http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch09me.htm.
Trentin, Massimiliano. (2012). The Middle East and the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.
