Prof. Ahmet K. Han is one of the most prominent strategic thinkers in Turkey today. An associate professor of international relations and an advisor to the rector at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, he is also a member of the board of EDAM, the Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Analysis in Istanbul.
Prof. Han spoke with The Media Line while in Jerusalem where he was addressing a conference on “100 Years since the Sykes-Picot Agreement: Lessons for the Middle East,” organized by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.
Opening the day-long event, Dr. Michael Borchard, Israel director of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, underscored the fact that “we are doomed to cooperate and work together.” Europe and the Middle East, and Europe and Israel, he said, have no choice but to live and work together.
The comment was a rejoinder to months of articles and commentary assigning responsibility for the miserable predicament of the Middle East today to Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, a Briton and a Frenchman, two obscure mid-level bureaucrats who did their best to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence as World War I drew to a close and the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
The ironic fact is that the Sykes-Picot agreement, now almost universally dismissed as a wrong-headed piece of colonialist design, was never, in fact, enforced. Instead, a series of adjustments dating from 1916 to the middle of the 20th century gave rise to the Levantine map as we now know it, with all its concomitant vicissitudes.
Prof. Han spoke exclusively with The Media Line. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
Q: Can we blame the Sykes-Picot agreement for the current situation in the Middle East?
A: No, not everything can be blamed on Sykes-Picot. It was a very short-lived agreement that was never enforced. It was a reflection of imperial conflict resolution mainly between the UK and France, both of which were colonial empires. The Russian empire was also a party to it, at the time it turned Bolshevik and wanted the colonial subjects of bourgeois masters to revolt. In fact, Bolsheviks still had this idea of worldwide revolution at the time. It didn’t work out, at least not to the extent they hoped it would.
Q: So what are the root causes of the ongoing chaos in the Middle East?
A: The short but comprehensive answer to the root cause of what is happening in the Middle East has to be understood at a socio-economic level, which necessitates contextualization within the larger frame of history, certainly not one that is anchored to a particular period of 100 years, or these particular 100 years.
Q: What do we learn by contextualizing it in that way?
A: The root causes goes back to the Crusades, to how Islam and Christianity met. For 200 years the lands of the Levant, which are the problematic subject matter of Sykes-Picot— mainly those lands, plus parts of the Arabian Peninsula — basically underwent what we could call a world war from the 11th to the 14th centuries, a significant trauma.
But more than the trauma itself, what is important is the aftermath of that trauma, despite the few centuries that were the zenith of the Ottoman era, from the conquest of Constantinople/Istanbul to the defeat of Vienna, barely 200 years. The West that lost against the Ottomans was not exactly the same West that won against the remnants of the Arab Islamic world during the Crusades. But in the Arab/Islamic psyche, the categorical taxonomy in the Crusades was the Franks, so it is as if it was almost the same people, and Sykes-Picot fell into that category.
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Q: How does that translate into reality today?
A: The thing is, after the Crusades, the Arab/Islamic civilization started on a downward slide in relation to the West. That kind of defeatism is hard to overcome, and I believe it is ongoing.
Q: So Sykes-Picot is blamed for everything in the Arab world?
A: Yes, but there is also the other influence, what I call the Ottoman impact. The West has gone through a very specific and far from universal experience when it comes to its political and economic development. I mean that over several centuries it went from feudalism to capitalism, and it is precisely that systemic, historical-political evolution that characterizes the West.
The important thing here is that this development had nothing to do with the Arab world or Islam and even less to do with the Ottomans, whose state system, economy, sociology and politics have done everything possible to preclude the evolution of such an experience. So no feudalism, no capitalism, and so forth.
Q: Which leaves us where?
A: In the West, that infrastructural historical experience led to certain forms of superstructure, which is basically what we call the political history of the west and the formation of states.
But Turkey was the center of an empire that, perhaps not consciously, but definitely evolutionally, stopped that historical development from taking place.
In the post-colonial period, lines or no lines in the sand, as we say in the post Sykes-Picot period, the intellectuals and political leaders of the Arab Islamic civilization mimicked their imperial masters in the hope that this would be the most effective way of institutionalizing government in the new emerging politics of the Middle East. When they looked around, what they knew as the most effective way of ruling a land was this idea of a territorial unitary state as seen in the examples of the West.
But, crucially, this mirroring didn’t have the socio-economic base that made it a success in the West.
Q: And in that gap…
A: And in that gap, you find the roots of what we are experiencing today.
Q: So who do we blame?
A: I don’t like the concept of blame. No one is to blame and we are all to blame. But if you ask what the Sykes-Picot agreement is responsible for, which I don’t really, you have to ask this question: why not question the leaders of the very same countries post-1930s? If we take the example of Sykes-Picot and try to build new nations out of that, why did they not try to come up with new arrangements among themselves which would better reflect the proverbial reality on the ground, ethnically and sociologically? They never did that. That would have meant capitalizing some of their power.
Q: No one likes giving up power.
A: Well, if we’re going to put all the blame on Sykes-Picot this question becomes plausible, even necessary. You can even argue there is a nascent orientalism in the question itself, if you don’t blame those Arab leaders. I mean, conversely, you are also saying they couldn’t do anything but follow the western model of conflict resolution … But that was not the case. They were rational actors and they did not want to capitalize any power. They didn’t want to give up power.
Q: Back to my question: who do we hold responsible for the current mess in the Middle East?
A: The blame falls on each and every one of us who has been in a position to decide the fate of these lands, including but not limited to Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, who had been empowered to make the right choices at that turning point and took a wrong turn. It is in vain to really blame them for the historical sociology of the land or the economic history that pertained as a result of those decisions.
Q: Still… Who is responsible?
A: At the core, what we can blame Sykes-Picot for it is an agreement that was shortsighted in its understanding of the dynamics on the ground. Nevertheless, that shortsightedness is part of politics. Plus, Sykes-Picot was not an agreement which was primarily structured around concerns of the Middle East. On the contrary: it was part of a larger scheme at the imperial level, which was mainly concerned with coming up with a post-World War systemic order. It was a reflection of how the French and the British conceived the future of the international system post WW I, and the place that they attributed the Middle East in that larger picture, so the primary concern for the agreement was not regional.
Q: This region was sort of incidental?
A: Welcome to the brute reality of politics. At the heart of all we are discussing is the concept of power and how it is used and abused. In that regard what we are talking about is immune to agency: take away Sykes and Picot and put in their place Chiang Kai-Shek or some Abdul Aziz, and voilá, you have the same arrangement mostly.
Sykes-Picot as it was executed was entirely a reflection of bilateral imperial rivalries. And Sykes-Picot, in that sense, was not the agreement that was signed but rather the process that took place between the time the agreement was signed until the time the British Mandate ended in Palestine/Israel in 1948.
Q: Why is Sykes-Picot blamed?
A: The process I was just mentioning is itself so full of bitter memories for the region’s Muslim populations that whenever a new source of grief emerges, everyone remembers Sykes-Picot. That is deep in the psyche. Just like the human body remembering the exact point where it initially hurt so much, even after the wound itself is healed.