Unimagined Communities Analysis
Ghosts from the Past: Colonial Legacy and the Middle East
A century ago, the British Diplomat Sir Marks Sykes, pointing to a map in front of him, is said to have remarked, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last “’k’ in Kirkuk.” This seemingly uncomplicated straight line on the map would be the line in the sand along which the then colonial powers of France and Britain would decide to partition the Ottoman Empire among themselves after its fall. Most of the territory to the south of this line would go to Britain, and that to the north would go to France. Since neither could agree over what to do with Palestine, it was decided it would be administered internationally. This secret agreement, which would come to be known …show more content…
Central to my analysis will be the concept of nation and state building.
Unimagined Communities
In his book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community, imagined both as inherently limited and sovereign”
(Anderson, 2006). In this definition, we find the key elements that come together to create the feeling of nationhood, of which we see that its limitedness in terms of a territorial boundary is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for nationhood. The nation needs to be imagined as a horizontal fraternity, with territorial boundaries and sovereignty within those boundaries, and this imagination has to be a collective imprint on the psyche of a nation’s fellow members.
Although, the final borders of Middle East that would be decided in a progressive number of deals and treaties over the following years did not bear much resemblance to the ones delineated in the Sykes Picot agreement, yet, the Sykes-Picot agreement would be their starting point, and ancestor in its having laid the precedence of chalking up arbitrary borders that ignored local identities or put disparate …show more content…
Unviable states
If the notion of national identity has been rather troubled, the notion of statehood sadly does not paint a pretty picture either. The history of the nation states in the
Middle East has been fraught with civil wars, political instability, and more often than not, military coups. To point to the Syrian case, the country had about twenty coups between 1949 and 1970.2 The case of Iraq is not much different; bereft right now with sectarian strife, the country has experienced its own share of coups. Lebanon has had a civil war, and been occupied, by both Israel and Syria3. Palestine, most of its territories being the Zionist state of Israel now, is struggling to have its statehood recognized. These countries, for the most part, transitioned from the mandates to new states without any strong built institutions or civic engagements, and sectarian rife and power struggles have kept them from reaching consensus among the different identities ever since.
The sectarian and ethnic divide in both Syria and Iraq runs deep. Iraq’s
A century ago, the British Diplomat Sir Marks Sykes, pointing to a map in front of him, is said to have remarked, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last “’k’ in Kirkuk.” This seemingly uncomplicated straight line on the map would be the line in the sand along which the then colonial powers of France and Britain would decide to partition the Ottoman Empire among themselves after its fall. Most of the territory to the south of this line would go to Britain, and that to the north would go to France. Since neither could agree over what to do with Palestine, it was decided it would be administered internationally. This secret agreement, which would come to be known …show more content…
Central to my analysis will be the concept of nation and state building.
Unimagined Communities
In his book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community, imagined both as inherently limited and sovereign”
(Anderson, 2006). In this definition, we find the key elements that come together to create the feeling of nationhood, of which we see that its limitedness in terms of a territorial boundary is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for nationhood. The nation needs to be imagined as a horizontal fraternity, with territorial boundaries and sovereignty within those boundaries, and this imagination has to be a collective imprint on the psyche of a nation’s fellow members.
Although, the final borders of Middle East that would be decided in a progressive number of deals and treaties over the following years did not bear much resemblance to the ones delineated in the Sykes Picot agreement, yet, the Sykes-Picot agreement would be their starting point, and ancestor in its having laid the precedence of chalking up arbitrary borders that ignored local identities or put disparate …show more content…
Unviable states
If the notion of national identity has been rather troubled, the notion of statehood sadly does not paint a pretty picture either. The history of the nation states in the
Middle East has been fraught with civil wars, political instability, and more often than not, military coups. To point to the Syrian case, the country had about twenty coups between 1949 and 1970.2 The case of Iraq is not much different; bereft right now with sectarian strife, the country has experienced its own share of coups. Lebanon has had a civil war, and been occupied, by both Israel and Syria3. Palestine, most of its territories being the Zionist state of Israel now, is struggling to have its statehood recognized. These countries, for the most part, transitioned from the mandates to new states without any strong built institutions or civic engagements, and sectarian rife and power struggles have kept them from reaching consensus among the different identities ever since.
The sectarian and ethnic divide in both Syria and Iraq runs deep. Iraq’s