A DETAILED LOOK AT THE MIDDLE EAST THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
February 17, 2015
By Nick Danforth
The Atlantic
In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian named Henry
King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out
the Middle East.
Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the
region’s political future was uncertain, and the two men seemed to
provide the necessary combination of business acumen and biblical
knowledge.
King and Crane’s quest was to find out how the region’s residents
wanted to be governed. It would be a major test of Wilson’s belief
in national self-determination: the idea that every people should
get its own state with clearly defined borders.
After spending three weeks interviewing religious and community
leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Turkey, the two
men and their team proposed that the Ottoman lands be divided as
shown in the map above.
Needless to say, the proposals were disregarded. In accordance with
the Sykes-Picot Agreement Britain and France had drafted in secret in
1916, Britain and France ultimately took over the region as so-called
mandate or caretaker powers.
The French-administered region would later become Lebanon and Syria,
and the British region would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq.
Today, many argue that a century of untold violence and instability —
culminating in ISIS’s brutal attempt t0 erase Middle Eastern borders
— might have been avoided if only each of the region’s peoples had
achieved independence after World War I.
But as the King-Crane Commission discovered back in 1919, ethnic and
religious groups almost never divide themselves into discrete units.
Nor do the members of each group necessarily share a vision of how
they wish to be governed.
The King-Crane report is still a striking document — less for what
it reveals about the Middle East as it might have been than as an
illustration of the fundamental dilemmas involved in drawing, or not
drawing, borders.
Indeed, the report insisted on forcing people to live together through
complicated legal arrangements that prefigure more recent proposals.
Among other things, the authors concluded that dividing Iraq into
ethnic enclaves was too absurd to merit discussion. Greeks and Turks
only needed one country because the “two races supplement each other.”
The Muslims and Christians of Syria needed to learn to “get on
together in some fashion” because “the whole lesson of modern social
consciousness points to the necessity of understanding ‘the other
half,’ as it can be understood only by close and living relations.”
But the commissioners also realized that simply lumping diverse
ethnic or religious groups together in larger states could lead to
bloody results.
Their report proposed all sorts of ideas for tiered, overlapping
mandates or bi-national federated states, ultimately endorsing a vision
that could be considered either pre- or post-national, depending on
one’s perspective.
In addition to outlining several autonomous regions, they proposed
that Constantinople (now Istanbul) become an international territory
administered by the League of Nations, since “no one nation can
be equal to the task” of controlling the city and its surrounding
straits, “least of all a nation with Turkey’s superlatively bad record
of misrule.”
Although the authors had been tasked with drawing borders, it
seems that once they confronted the many dilemmas of implementing
self-determination, they developed a more fluid approach to nationhood
and identity.
Disagreement among the region’s residents about their own future
certainly helped the commission reach this conclusion. The
commissioners traveled from city to city accepting petitions and
taking testimony, compiling a rare record of Arab popular opinion
from the period. This early polling exercise captured a wide range
of views–some overlapping, some irreconcilable.
Some 80 percent of those interviewed favored the establishment of a
“United Syria” — an outcome that, far from settling the question
of what self-determination would look like, forced the commission to
wrestle with the crucial issue of what should happen to minorities.
Many of the Christians living in this hypothetical future state,
particularly those in the Mount Lebanon region, spoke out forcefully
against being part of a larger, Muslim-dominated entity. Many called
for an “Independent Greater Lebanon,” whose territory would be roughly
equivalent to that of the modern state of Lebanon.
The commissioners’ proposed solution was to grant Lebanon “a sufficient
measure of local autonomy” so as not to “diminish the security of
[its] inhabitants.” But their explanation for why this autonomy
should fall short of complete independence seems to challenge the
logic of self-determination: “Lebanon would be in a position to exert
a stronger and more helpful influence if she were within the Syrian
state, feeling its problems and needs and sharing all its life,
instead of outside it, absorbed simply in her own narrow concerns.”
The broader conclusion they reached about human affairs was similarly
at odds with the principle of self-determination, and it anticipated
the 21st century’s recurring debates about where the Middle East’s
borders really belong. “No doubt the quick mechanical solution of
the problem of difficult relations is to split the people up into
little independent fragments,” they wrote. “But in general, to attempt
complete separation only accentuates the differences and increases
the antagonism.”
Even when they conceded exceptions — for instance, in the “imperative
and inevitable” separation of the Turks and Armenians given the Turks’
“terrible massacres” and “cruelties horrible beyond description” —
King, Crane, and their team nonetheless concluded that “a separation
… involves very difficult problems” and could easily backfire.
Ultimately, the King-Crane proposal relied on European or American
supervision, through the mandate system, to fudge different degrees
of sovereignty and ensure minority rights in multi-national states.
Placing different mandates under the same mandatory power became
an easy way to separate peoples while maintaining an administrative
link between them: Syria and Mesopotamia, for instance, could both
be under British supervision, while Turkey and Armenia could both be
overseen by the United States.
There is a telling condescension to the commissioners’
insistence on foreign administration as the best way to implement
“self-determination,” but it wasn’t that different from the widely
shared belief at the time that oversight from a supra-national body
like the League of Nations would also be necessary to ensure minority
rights in the new nations of Eastern Europe.
In some ways, it also wasn’t that different from the British and
French belief, evident in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that continued
imperial rule was necessary to manage local differences. There are
echoes of this conviction in the anti-nationalist imperial nostalgia
that exists in some quarters today.
Indeed, part of the reason the British and French felt so comfortable
drawing “arbitrary” borders was that they believed they would
remain in a position to manage relations across them. In this sense,
Anglo-French imperialism relied on controlling borders and suppressing
self-determination within the region, while the King-Crane commission
was more interested in trying to find a balance between them.
This balance has yet to be achieved. Today, some people argue that
Iraq would be better off divided into smaller states, and that Syria
might split up on its own, while others — including ISIS — have
insisted that the solution is to do away entirely with borders like
the one between Iraq and Syria and to create a much larger entity.
But both solutions, along with the countless alternative maps proposed
for the region, remain focused on redrawing borders rather than
transcending them. And for what it’s worth, neither a subdivided
Syria nor a union between Syria and Mesopotamia were outcomes that
many locals campaigned for when King and Crane came to visit.
All of this suggests a need to look beyond the current paradigm of
borders. The people of Scotland, for example, recently decided that
their preferred relationship with London involved a mix of dependence
and independence rather than leaving the U.K. altogether or allowing
England to have total sovereignty over their affairs. And in Syria,
a federated arrangement that parcels out control of the country’s
territory without breaking it apart could be a faster route to peace
than complete victory by any one side.
Of course, recognizing the limitations of nation-states, in the Middle
East or elsewhere, does not imply that with a little more foresight the
Arab world could have transitioned directly from Ottoman imperialism
to post-national European modernity.
Historical forces worked against implementing more flexible
alternatives to the nation-state system then, and they still do today.
But the current regional uncertainty may require the same kind of
imagination the King-Crane commission brought to its analysis.
A century later, it’s clear that the question of what political
arrangements can help people “get on together in some fashion”
remains just as difficult as ever.
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/61746