A hundred years ago World War I was raging. At the height of the conflict, the British
and the French met secretly in order to divvy up the spoils in the Middle East after the
war would end. This became known as the Sykes- Picot Agreement, and we're about to mark its
hundredth anniversary. Today when we look at the Middle East and we see so many problems, many
people suggest if it weren't for that Sykes- Picot Agreement, if it weren't for the imperial
drawing of new borders and boundaries, the Middle East might be a very different place.
All of this begs the question, what if the Middle East's borders were redrawn?
There's all numbers of ways in which this could have been done.
So what if the borders were drawn on ethnic lines? Everyone remembers the story of Lawrence
of Arabia and his great Arab revolt. He had promised the Arabs a state, and you know, many
of the Arabs expected a single state for all the Arabs in the region. It was Sykes-Picot
that dashed those hopes, as well as making conflicting promises to others. However, are
all Arabs the same? In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the Egyptian monarchy and Egypt
became the seat of hotbed Arab nationalism. That's the idea that the Arabs should have
a single state, that many of the borders and boundaries, should be erased. Did it really
work? Well, Egypt tried to unify with Syria, but frankly the cultural and political differences
between Egypt and Syria were just too much. Likewise, at various points in time, Jordan
and Iraq tried to unify and likewise, that didn't work. If you go across the Arab world,
from Casablanca to Cairo and from Baghdad to Beirut, many of the Arabs in the various
states can't even understand each other's dialects. There's that much difference. If
there's one thing in the Middle East, no one is defined by one variable. No one's simply
just an Arab or just a Jew or just a Shiite, or just a member of this tribe or just a member
of that family. Everyone has a much more complex identity, and it can lead to a rapid division
of any polity based solely on ethnicity.
So what if the Middle East borders were drawn on the basis of religion? You've got the three,
big monotheistic religions in the region. You've got Judaism. You've got Christianity
and you've got Islam. But who speaks for each? And when it comes to Islam, we all hear about
the divisions between the Sunnis and the Shiites and those divisions don't seem to coming to
a conclusion anytime soon. If you're going to divide states on the basis of religion,
well first of all what happens to minorities in any of those religious states? Are they
going to have any rights whatsoever or do they have to move? In effect, would we have
a new round of sectarian cleansing? Just think about the Islamic State for a moment. They
killed the Shiites, enslaved the Yazidis and sent the Christians packing. Is that really
what people want for the rest of the Middle East? Is that really what the rest of the
Middle East wants? One of the other problems with dividing the Middle East on the basis
of religion goes back to the confluence of geography and history. One valley could belong
to one minority. Another valley could belong to another and the third one could belong
to the first minority all over again. So to draw these borders just on the basis of religion
would be very difficult
What if the Middle East borders were redrawn on geographic lines? Is there any natural
way to do it? First of all, most of the population of the Middle East lives along the coast or
they live along rivers and so what you have when you go across the broad swath of the
Middle East are very heavy concentrations of population followed by hundreds of miles
of very little. So let's think about these population centers. You have the Nile River
and you have the Fertile Crescent. Well, that's Egypt and Iraq right there. You have the Mediterranean
Coast. Well, that's the Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria. Then you
have all the states that exist in the Persian Gulf: Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar,
Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Could there be some divisions there or re-divisions? Could
there be some re-divisions there? Absolutely. Here's the thing, if you were going to redraw
the borders based on geographic ground, you'd probably end up looking not dissimilar to
what we have now where you have states surrounding the population centers. And then you have
borders drawn somewhere out in the desert simply to divide one from another.
What about all those people who say that the states of the Middle East are artificial?
Well, to some extent that could have been true a hundred years ago, but is it really
the case today? A hundred years is a long time, and Jordanians, Iraqis, Egyptians, Saudis,
Lebanese, they've all developed unique identities, even if you were to redraw the borders, would
those identities that are based on a hundred years of common history, of literature, of
language, of TV shows, really go away? The answer to that is probably not.
When people study the Middle East, let alone live there, it's hard to emerge optimistic.
After all, this is a region with myriad problems that always seem to be on the verge of boiling
over. But if the past hundred years have taught us anything, it's that there probably isn't any magic formula.
So should the Middle East have new borders? Should a century of Sykes-Picot be put in
the dustbin of history? Let us know what you think in the comments, and let us know any
other topics you might want us to cover in AEI’s “What if” series.