The Middle East has most often been dominated through history by Anatolia, Persia or Arabia.
Centrally located in Old World, global trade was funnelled though this region, and trade
routes are best exploited when you have them inside your empire.
Tariffs on trade transferred masses of wealth from both ends of the silk road to the middlemen.
Add the most productive arable land on earth, and whoever controlled the area was set for
life.
Until someone took it off their hands.
From empires Hittite, Achaemenid, Roman, Parthian, Sassanid, any number of
Caliphates or Persian Dynasties, and then... the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.
The Ottomans held the land when something crucial happened.
Deep-water Navigation.
Old-School empires were contiguous and compact.
You can't deploy an aircraft carrier in second century Mesopotamia, so policing trade routes
was difficult.
On land and sea there are bandits, pirates and competitors.
And you had to sail within sight of the coast, which made you easy to pick off.
As a result, trade routes were long, but no single entity could police the whole length.
Trade was like pass-the-parcel.
More often than not, that parcel through the Middle East, and Europeans paid heavy tariffs.
When they would get the opportunity to get around those tariffs, they would take it with
both hands.
15th Century: advances in astronomy, boat building, medicine and artillery coalesced
in the form of Portugal.
Portuguese merchants rounded Africa and pioneered deep-water navigation, out of sight of the
coast.
'Pass-the-parcel' became 'long ball' trade and they cut the prices of spices by 90%.
The Ottomans land was no longer what it was.
And Empires could now expand in a different way: across the water.
But why would they do that in the first place?
Why does this area share a military, a president, a government, a senate, a legal system, police
and courts?
Why doesn't Brittany enjoy protection of the Royal Navy, and why doesn't Corsica use Italian
courts?
After all, these areas are closer to the respective HQs of these departments in other countries.
The answer is Economies of Scale.
Take, for instance, Crime.
The costs involved of the Spanish police catching a Belgian suspect in the German embassy in
Greece, then sending him to be tried in the Hague under French law would be huge.
But unify jurisdictions, cut down barriers and this job is made markedly easier by organisations
like Interpol.
Within a country, when everything is unified and heading in the same direction, that's
when transaction costs shrink, and benefits skyrocket.
The bigger the jurisdictions, the bigger the benefits.
The bigger the Empire, the bigger the profits.
Brittany, Paris and Corsica dropped the barriers between them long ago.
Links between these areas are stronger than across borders.
This is the benefit of size, but there are also drawbacks for governing those lands,
if the people don't want you there.
An Empire is large groups of distinct people, called nations, all ruled over by one, in
an asymmetric relationship.
This system makes the oppressed pay for their own oppression.
Kings made and proclaimed Empires under authority of God.
One nation ruling over another was fine, because everyone did it,
and if God didn't want it, he wouldn't have let it happen, would he?
Later, leaders justified the same activity for the glory and financial benefit of their
ethic brethren.
Because very rarely does the King live right on top of the most
valuable land.
But he can go out and wave a flag over another nation that does.
Any single empire might not be destined to last forever, because this kind of order,
understandably, results in angering all those people that you're oppressing.
A province that doesn't care for your policy on language and religion, or a region that
doesn't appreciate your labour laws will want to pull away to create their own state, damn
those economies of scale.
And anyone can go out and make their own nation, because of fictions.
A fiction is not necessarily a lie.
"Homer Simpson is yellow." is not a lie -- that's just fictional.
"Homer Simpson is a medieval Norwegian Lumberjack."
-- that's an outright porkie.
When humans buy into a fiction, they can build universes of fictional truths.
A person who believes in a fictional universe will be telling the 'truth', regardless of
how much evidence there is to the contrary in reality.
Birds preen, Cats lick and Primate pick parasites (and sometimes eat them) but humans create
social groups by telling fictions to each other.
Dogs don't do that.
Human language ability makes fictions so potent a tool at manipulation, it allows us to integrate,
communicate and cooperate at scales unseen by other mammals.
And however those fictions are used, they can make us believe in things that are only
real because we believe in them.
Marriage.
Family.
Money.
On a larger scale, that gives us tribes.
Cities.
Kingdoms.
Or wars over whatever purpose they want, then justifying horrific acts by pointing out symbols
that represent things because people say that they do represent those things.
A Balkan shepherd and a Levantine baker don't share significant fictions today, but 2000
years ago with a banner to fight under, they both could rise the ranks in the same army
for the glory of Rome.
Maybe in 2000 years from today, we'll say the same things about France.
Not only can Fictions be used to tie a nation together, they can also be used to carve out
smaller nations from inside.
The King's empire was diverse, but not in the same way as we hear the word today.
Occupying a nation is not the same as migration.
Voluntary migrants are a completely different breed.
They are fertile candidates for a cultural conversion.
Those who voluntarily leave their home have to believe in their new one.
As a migrant is held to higher standards, and did far more work to attain membership
of the new nation, their belief is stronger than someone born into a nation that they
didn't choose.
That's why migrational diversity can be a strength, but home-grown
differences are a thorn in your side.
Do this right, and you can be sure that the conversion rate of your migrants will be off
the charts.
Notably, one Empire has not only done that, but also successfully converted the people
they occupied, and absorbed them.
The US successfully bought off the occupied nations with enough genocide, and settled
the lands with their own people with their own converted migrants that today there is
no threat to the country from the Cherokee, the Sioux, or the Navajo.
Those who identify as Irish-, Italian- or African-Americans use those prefixes to distinguish
between each other, but outside this limited area it doesn't mean the same.
Long ago they dreamt 'the American Dream', and are closer to each other than they are
to any 'motherland'.
That's what makes the States a nation, and no longer an Empire.
The 20th Century saw one of the biggest upheavals in political history: the shift from Empire
to nation.
It went hand-in-hand (and had to) with the change of economic policy.
Specifically, trade.
No-one knows how to make a cup of coffee.
The inputs seem simple.
But each input needs its own inputs, and each iteration of that process gets deeper and
more ludicrous until eventually the web you've weaved looks like an entire civilisation.
When any two persons can trade capital, goods or labour without interference , this is a
free market economy.
A key component of capitalism.
Planning this is a monstrous task.
...but even limited government has its role.
For countries that face trade barriers, accessing commodities is expensive.
Anything inside your country will be cheaper.
So naturally, the neediest and most capable countries will go out across the seven seas,
gunboat in hand, to absorb what they need into an empire.
This is empire capitalism.
Maintaining long supply lines, imposing your order.
Just as sport has referees, our coffee trade has police and laws to punish crimes.
For bigger problems, there's bigger enforcement.
Wherever cargo ships go, warships follow.
Coffee can't reach its market without protection.
The bigger your country, the stronger your defence against competitors.
The small states of early modern Europe that grew prosperous from mercantile trade couldn't
survive the growing protectionist world pg the 19th Century.
They couldn't afford the protection needed for their shrinking markets.
As trade policy changed, they were swallowed up by the more resilient empires.
The ones that weren't, were the Dutch.
Who went out and made an empire of their own.
Blah, Blah, blah.
World War One.
Empires fell apart, but the overall economic picture didn't really change.
High barriers were still in full swing.
The countries that emerged from the imperial debris carried on as before - absorbing and
expanding - empire economics.
You can guess what happened next.
When the world emerged again from war, the West wouldn't follow again the model of high-protectionism,
WW1-style empires with competing economies and militaries to match.
Because in New Hampshire, a movement was rearing its head to take down those barriers and unite
the world under one jurisdiction.
To allow smaller countries to thrive again without completely paying for protection.
And big countries to thrive without Empire.
The new world order was coming.
Coffee is only the second-most traded commodity in the world.
The #1 commodity has its own maritime class that we rely on every single day - the oil
tanker - the new smaller countries that made most use of those came from the breakup of
the Ottoman Empire.
When the Ottoman Empire was taken to pieces, the Turkey that emerged from the ashes didn't
Reconquista the empire, and not just because they don't speak Spanish.
Ataturk was the prototype of the Nationalist strongman.
He rebuilt Turkey as a secular, modernist nation-state.
Outlawing public displays of religion, Forcing western-style
dress, imposing the Romanised Turkish language.
All.
But.
The.
Flag.
The strongman with the unifying fictions used his 10 diplomatic power on Turkification.
And all that ethnic cleansing hadn't hurt, either.
Turkey was now immutably centred in Anatolia.
No more overextension into the Balkans and the Middle East.
Those countries were more trouble than they were worth.
This approach caught fire.
Egypt, Afghanistan and others did the very same.
Strongmen leaders unifying their countries around the story of their country as a nation,
to prevent further breakup.
Secular.
Western.
United.
But not often Democratic.
Because if you allow your people a say on whether you can digest their culture, the
ballot box won't be your friend.
The countries that emerged from the Ottoman debris were an odd breed.
All of the drawbacks of Empire diversity with none of the benefits of scale.
This area had never congealed in this way, because there was no such thing as a 'Syrian',
an 'Iraqi' or a 'Palestinian' people, until the lines on the ground told them so.
The borders drawn cleaved existing nations apart, and stitched Frankenstein
beings into existence.
Creating a nation from the raw materials left here is like providing a chef part of the
ingredients to each a rhubarb crumble, a salade niçoise, and a lamb vindaloo.
You're going to need a special sauce to help that dish go down.
Arab Nationalism was a socialist anti-imperialist movement, and was a fiction used by as a tool
to hold brittle nations together.
The message: put aside your religion, your sect and your tribe.
Come together.
We are all Arabs.
Except you, Kurds.
Egypt's successes in the taking the Suez Canal back from Britain were fuelled by Western
fears that Cairo would ally with Moscow.
IN the region, Arab Nationalism got the credit.
As well as that, the most successful pan-Arab organisations across the region had achieved
their aim of a United Arab Republic.
So all was going smooth, right?
But the U.A.R. was only made of two former countries, and it was only for three years.
Not to mention Israel, as a western-backed project, which was seen by Arabs as a thinly-veiled
extension of old school colonialism.
Israel felt the the winds of hostility blowing their direction.
Preemptively, they invaded all their neighbours.
And won handily.
They took a large chunk of Egypt, all the way to the Suez Canal, that trophy of Arab
nationalism.
The Arab Nationalist fiction took its second major hit.
Following that, Arab nationalists practically dropped their ideals.
The pragmatics of holding onto power by any means necessary.
Finally, Egypt signed a peace deal with Israel in 1978 The fatal blow to the fiction.
It's all downhill from here.