Authors: Henry Kissinger
Convulsed by internal disturbances, the Ottoman Empire was treated by the Western powers as “
the Sick Man of Europe
.” The fate of its vast holdings in the Balkans and the Middle East, among them significant Christian communities with historical links to the West, became “the Eastern Question,” and for much of the nineteenth century the major European powers tried to divide up the Ottoman possessions without upsetting the European balance of power. On their part, the Ottomans had the recourse of the weak; they tried to manipulate the contending forces to achieve a maximum of freedom of action.
In this manner, in the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered the European balance as a provisional member of Westphalian international order, but as a declining power not entirely in control of its fate—a “weight” to be considered in establishing the European equilibrium but not a full partner in designing it. Britain used the Ottoman Empire to block Russian advances toward the straits; Austria allied itself alternately with Russia and the Ottomans in dealing with Balkan issues.
World War I ended the wary maneuvering. Allied with Germany, the Ottomans entered the war with arguments drawn from both
international systems—the Westphalian and the Islamic. The Sultan accused Russia of violating the empire’s “armed neutrality” by committing an “unjustified attack, contrary to international law,” and pledged to “turn to arms in order to safeguard our lawful interests” (a quintessentially Westphalian casus belli). Simultaneously, the chief Ottoman religious official declared “jihad,” accusing Russia, France, and Britain of “
attacks dealt against the Caliphate
for the purpose of annihilating Islam” and proclaiming a religious duty for “Mohammedans of all countries” (including those under British, French, or Russian administration) to “hasten with their bodies and possessions to the Djat [jihad]” or face “the wrath of God.”
Holy war occasionally moves the already powerful to even greater efforts; it is doomed, however, whenever it flouts strategic or political realities. And the impetus of the age was national identity and national interests, not global jihad. Muslims in the British Empire ignored the declaration of jihad; key Muslim leaders in British India focused instead on independence movement activities, often ecumenical in nature and in partnership with Hindu compatriots. In the Arabian Peninsula, national aspirations—inherently anti-Ottoman—awakened. German hopes for pan-Islamic backing in the war proved a chimera. Following the war’s end in 1918, the former Ottoman territories were drawn into the Westphalian international system by a variety of imposed mechanisms.
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed with what was left of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, reconceived the Middle East as a patchwork of states—a concept heretofore not part of its political vocabulary. Some, like Egypt and non-Arab Iran, had had earlier historical experiences as empires and cultural entities. Others were
invented as British or French “mandates,” variously a subterfuge of colonialism or a paternalistic attempt to define them as incipient states in need of tutelage. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 (named after its British and French negotiators) had divided the Middle East into what were in effect spheres of influence. The mandate system, as ratified by the League of Nations, put this division into effect: Syria and Lebanon were assigned to France; Mesopotamia, later Iraq, was placed under British influence; and Palestine and Transjordan became the British “mandate for Palestine,” stretching from the Mediterranean coast to Iraq. Each of these entities contained multiple sectarian and ethnic groups, some of which had a history of conflict with each other. This allowed the mandating power to rule in part by manipulating tensions, in the process laying the foundation for later wars and civil wars.
With respect to burgeoning Zionism (the Jewish nationalist movement to establish a state in the Land of Israel, a cause that had predated the war but gained force in its wake), the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration—a letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary to Lord Rothschild—announced that it favored “
the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people” while offering the reassurance that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Britain compounded the ambiguity of this formulation by seemingly promising the same territory as well to the Sharif of Mecca.
These formal rearrangements of power propelled vast upheavals. In 1924, the secular-nationalist leaders of the newly proclaimed Republic of Turkey abolished the principal institution of pan-Islamic unity, the caliphate, and declared a secular state. Henceforth the Muslim world was stranded between the victorious Westphalian international order and the now-unrealizable concept of
dar al-Islam.
With scant experience, the societies of the Middle East set out to redefine
themselves as modern states, within borders that for the most part had no historical roots.
The emergence of the European-style secular state had no precedent in Arab history. The Arabs’ first response was to adapt the concepts of sovereignty and statehood to their own ends. The established commercial and political elites began to operate within the Westphalian framework of order and a global economy; what they demanded was their peoples’ right to join as equal members. Their rallying cry was genuine independence for established political units, even those recently constructed, not an overthrow of the Westphalian order. In pursuit of these objectives, a secularizing current gained momentum. But it did not, as in Europe, culminate in a pluralistic order.
Two opposing trends appeared
. “Pan-Arabists” accepted the premise of a state-based system. But the state they sought was a united Arab nation, a single ethnic, linguistic, and cultural entity. By contrast, “political Islam” insisted on reliance on the common religion as the best vehicle for a modern Arab identity. The Islamists—of which the Muslim Brotherhood is now the most familiar expression—were often drawn from highly educated members of the new middle class. Many considered Islamism as a way to join the postwar era without having to abandon their values, to be modern without having to become Western.
Until World War II, the European powers were sufficiently strong to maintain the regional order they had designed for the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I. Afterward the European powers’ capacity to control increasingly restive populations disappeared. The United States emerged as the principal outside influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, the more or less feudal and monarchical governments in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya were overthrown by their military leaders, who proceeded to establish secular governance.
The new rulers, generally recruited from segments of the
population heretofore excluded from the political process, proceeded to broaden their popular support by appeals to nationalism. Populist, though not democratic, political cultures took root in the region: Gamal Abdel Nasser—the charismatic populist leader of Egypt from 1954 to 1970—and his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, rose through the ranks from provincial backgrounds. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, of comparable humble origins, practiced a more extreme version of secular military governance: ruling by intimidation and brutality from the early 1970s (at first as de facto strongman, then as President beginning in 1979) to 2003, he sought to overawe the region with his bellicosity. Both Hussein and his ideological ally, Syria’s shrewd and ruthless Hafez al-Assad, entrenched their sectarian minorities over far-larger majority populations (ironically, of opposite orientations—with Sunnis governing majority Shias in Iraq, and the quasi-Shia Alawites governing majority Sunnis in Syria) by avowing pan-Arab nationalism. A sense of common national destiny developed as a substitute for the Islamic vision.
But the Islamic legacy soon reasserted itself. Islamist parties merging a critique of the excesses and failures of secular rulers with scriptural arguments about the need for divinely inspired governance advocated the formation of a pan-Islamic theocracy superseding the existing states. They vilified the West and the Soviet Union alike; many backed their vision by opportunistic terrorist acts. The military rulers reacted harshly, suppressing Islamist political movements, which they charged with undermining modernization and national unity.
This era is, with reason, not idealized today. The military, monarchical, and other autocratic governments in the Middle East treated dissent as sedition, leaving little space for the development of civil society or pluralistic cultures—a lacuna that would haunt the region into the twenty-first century. Still, within the context of autocratic nationalism, a tentative accommodation with contemporary international order was taking shape. Some of the more ambitious rulers such as
Nasser and Saddam Hussein attempted to enlarge their territorial reach—either through force or by means of demagogic appeals to Arab unity. The short-lived confederation between Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961 reflected such an attempt. But these efforts failed because the Arab states were becoming too protective of their own patrimony to submerge it into a broader project of political amalgamation. Thus the eventual common basis of policy for the military rulers was the state and a nationalism that was, for the most part, coterminous with established borders.
Within this context, they sought to exploit the rivalry of the Cold War powers to enhance their own influence. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was their vehicle to pressure the United States. It became the principal arms supplier and diplomatic advocate for the nationalist Arab states, which in turn generally supported Soviet international objectives. The military autocrats professed a general allegiance to “Arab socialism” and admiration of the Soviet economic model, yet in most cases economies remained traditionally patriarchal and focused on single industries run by technocrats. The overriding impetus was national interest, as the regimes conceived it, not political or religious ideology.
Cold War–era relations between the Islamic and the non-Islamic worlds, on the whole, followed this essentially Westphalian, balance-of-power-based approach. Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq generally supported Soviet policies and followed the Soviet lead. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Morocco were friendly to the United States and were relying on U.S. support for their security. All of these countries, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, were run as secular states—though several drew on religion-tinged traditional forms of monarchy for political legitimacy—ostensibly following principles of statecraft based on the national interest. The basic distinction was which countries saw their interests served by alignment with which particular superpower.
In 1973–74, this alignment shifted. Convinced that the Soviet
Union could supply arms but not diplomatic progress toward recovering the Sinai Peninsula from Israeli occupation (Israel had taken the peninsula during 1967’s Six-Day War), Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat switched sides. Henceforth Egypt would operate as a de facto American ally; its security would be based on American, rather than Soviet, weapons. Syria and Algeria moved to a position more equidistant between the two sides in the Cold War. The regional role of the Soviet Union was severely reduced.
The one ideological issue uniting Arab views was the emergence of Israel as a sovereign state and internationally recognized homeland for the Jewish people. Arab resistance to that prospect led to four wars: in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. In each, Israeli arms prevailed.
Sadat’s national-interest-based switch to, in effect, the anti-Soviet orbit inaugurated a period of intense diplomacy that led to two disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel and a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League. Sadat was vilified and ultimately assassinated. Yet his courageous actions found imitators willing to reach comparable accommodations with the Jewish state. In 1974, Syria and Israel concluded a disengagement agreement to define and protect the military front lines between the two countries. This arrangement has been maintained for four decades, through wars and terrorism and even during the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Jordan and Israel practiced a mutual restraint that eventually culminated in a peace agreement. Internationally, Syria’s and Iraq’s authoritarian regimes continued to lean toward the Soviet Union but remained open—case by case—to supporting other policies. By the end of the 1970s, Middle East crises began to look more and more like the Balkan crises of the nineteenth century—an effort by secondary states to manipulate the rivalries of dominant powers on behalf of their own national objectives.
Diplomatic association with the United States was not, however,
ultimately able to solve the conundrum faced by the nationalist military autocracies. Association with the Soviet Union had not advanced political goals; association with the United States had not defused social challenges. The authoritarian regimes had substantially achieved independence from colonial rule and provided an ability to maneuver between the major power centers of the Cold War. But their economic advance had been too slow and the access to its benefits too uneven to be responsive to their peoples’ needs—problems exacerbated in many cases where their wealth of energy resources fostered a near-exclusive reliance on oil for national revenues, and an economic culture unfavorable to innovation and diversification. Above all, the abrupt end of the Cold War weakened their bargaining position and made them more politically dispensable. They had not learned how, in the absence of a foreign enemy or international crisis, to mobilize populations that increasingly regarded the state not as an end in itself but as having an obligation to improve their well-being.
As a result, these elites found themselves obliged to contend with a rising tide of domestic discontent generating challenges to their legitimacy. Radical groups promised to replace the existing system in the Middle East with a religiously based Middle East order reflecting two distinct universalist approaches to world order: the Sunni version by way of the regionally extensive Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928, Hamas, the radical movement that gained power in Gaza in 2007, and the global terrorist movement al-Qaeda; and the Shia version through the Khomeini revolution and its offshoot, the Lebanese “state within a state” Hezbollah. In violent conflict with each other, they were united in their commitment to dismantle the existing regional order and rebuild it as a divinely inspired system.