Colonialism and Conflict

Colonialism and Western foreign occupation of the early 20th century in the Middle East has contributed to the current political atmosphere in the region. Western imperial powers created arbitrary nation-state boundary lines, forced the adoption of distinctly western political and economic ideologies, and implemented puppet leadership and oppressive regimes. Current political, religious, tribal, and sectarian tensions in the Middle East have origins in the region’s past of western imperial domination. Although these tensions are indicative of why Winston Churchill’s artificially created boundaries are ineffective in organizing Middle Eastern nation-states, the West cannot be blamed for Middle Eastern governments’ inability to nurture a socio-political atmosphere conducive to creating successful, modern cosmopolitan states. Colonialism cannot be blamed for why countries like Iraq lack success in governance because there are far too many examples of successful Middle Eastern governments that were born out of colonialism.

National boundaries artificially created by the West may be the root cause for much of the conflict in the Middle East, but as John Lukac’s points out in his article for the Boston Globe, Winston Churchill’s Role in the Middle East and Iraq, they did result in stability:

The results of the (West’s) grandiose remaking of the map of the Middle East have remained till this day: Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia among others are extant entities even now. Whereas twenty years after WWI, Poland and the Baltic states ceased to exist, albeit temporarily, and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia no longer exist.

This observation illustrates that if sectarian and religious turmoil were the result of poorly designed boundaries that defined the West’s role in decolonizing the region, then these states would have broken apart long ago. What is failed to be recognized by those who have decided the damage from the history of Western imperialism (which was relatively brief compared to the foreign occupation of the Mongols, the Turks, and the Persians in the Middle East) is the reason for turmoil in the Middle East, is that there have been plenty of success stories within the Middle East like Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

This is not to say these countries did not have their share of struggles, but what modern nation has had a conflict free history? The United States as a British imperial colony fought a revolution against its colonizer Britain. The United States also experienced deep ideological divisions that led to an extremely bloody civil war. Presupposing the Middle East would have been better off without the boundary-making West, it leads one to wonder what would the Turks have done in the Middle East if the Ottoman Empire had not been defeated in WWI.

During the Treaty of Versailles, Churchill was praised by the League of Nations for having turned “a mere collection of tribes into a nation in Iraq” in the mandate system that the Sykes-Picot Agreement created to help administer governance in the Ottoman colonies after the war. The accepted doctrine at the time was that tribes should be combined to create larger nation-states. Collective tribes have proved to be extremely beneficial to the success of the governments in Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan, and more recently with Algeria, and Egypt. By addressing the concerns of the tribes within a country and not focusing on the Islamists, the Jordanian people were able to create an identity of national Jordanian and tribal allegiance before looking to their religious Islamic ties. In an article Mamoun Fandy wrote for The Middle East Policy Journal, Tribe vs. Islam: The Post-colonial Arab State and the Democratic Imperative, he confirms:

Tribe-Islam relations tend to lend support to the superiority of legitimate social organizations, such as the tribe, over ideologies, including Islam (including Shiite and Sunni groups).

King Hussein in Jordan was aware of the strength and ties the people in the Jordanian state held to their tribal affiliations, and his keen observations helped to create the Jordanian state.
What unsuccessful Middle Eastern states have failed to do in introducing and fostering tribal allegiance regardless of present post-colonial borders, discounts the Islam-tribe equation and allows external forces to transform the tribe into a military-backed force within the state. Hizbullah is a prime example of this result. Hizbullah shows the tremendous impact this militant group (a so-called military tribe) can have on the rest of the region as demonstrated by their transnational influence to Lebanon, one of France’s previous success stories until outside forces from Hizbullah and Israel engaged in combat within the sovereign borders of Lebanon. Hizbullah is the very military tribe that Mamoun Fandy warns of in his Tribe vs. Islam article. What is problematic about Hizbullah is there is not a state it is home to. Like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, such a military tribe can be based within a particular state’s borders that permits the military tribe to claim safe haven, but it still must operate across borders. As such, the military tribe poses a hindrance to the regional domination that Western colonialism has actually provided.

Bernard Lewis, in his article What Went Wrong? in the Atlantic Monthly, calls for a new approach in examining the Middle East he said:

For the oppressive but ineffectual governments that rule much of the Middle East, finding targets to blame serves a useful, indeed essential, purpose—to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have introduced. They seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects toward other outside targets.

Lewis examines the blame game in the Middle East and firmly adheres to looking forward for solutions, not re-examining how boundaries could have been drawn to accommodate all of the varied interests in the Middle East. If that were the case there would be a Kurdish Nation by now. This realistic approach is helpful in understanding why so many problems must be combated in the Middle East. For such historical divisions to be overcome, they need not be forgotten but merely set off to the side for larger strides to be made in the economic and political institutions that make up the Middle East.

For many Middle Eastern countries, their dependence on oil revenue has allowed for autocratic and tyrannical governments to remain in power despite popular opposition among their citizenry because the governments are not reliant upon their people for financial support. Greater opposition would be voiced by the citizenry, requiring more participation, if there was a unifying issue to protest such as taxation without representation (link to mamoun) and the unequal distribution of oil. Mamoun and Lewis both examine this proposition in their articles about the Middle East. Each claims that it is ludicrous for these countries to not find alternative sources of income because of the uncertainty of oil and outside aid to the countries. Furthermore, the uneven distribution of profits from oil among the people, especially amongst the tribal factions, creates an extremely unstable environment for the governments and the people.

Fair representation is a positive outcome of Western influence in the region. The lack of fair representation in many Middle Eastern governments, as compared to other similarly ethnically and religiously diverse former colonies like India, leads one to question whether Western imperialism was too brief in this region. In India, British occupation lasted a century, so Western culture could be understood and adapted to the Indian culture more fully. This is not to say that Western culture is necessarily superior to that of Middle Eastern or Indian cultures, but positive elements of both systems are more easily fused together when evident for a longer period of time, as was the case with India. Yemen and Jordan were able to identify that the source of a successful and respected government is freedom. Bernard Lewis in his article What Went Wrong? describes this freedom:

It is freedom of mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and persuasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny.

Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Syria adamantly oppose this Western idea of freedom because their leaders rule based on force and fear from the people. As Western experience amply demonstrates (France being a prime example), freedom and the road to democracy is long and hard, and full of pitfalls and obstacles. Realistic goals should be created for specific Middle Eastern countries. Just as tyrannical monarchies and dictators are in the past for the most part, imperialism is also in the Middle East’s past, and to keep looking back hinders what happens now and in the future for the Middle East.

Mistakes from the past must be acknowledged and avoided in the future; such is the case with the recognition of the importance of tribes in Jordan. It was posited by Sarah Gualtieri in her article Revisioning the Colonial Middle East in the Radical History Review, that more emphasis should be put on tribal affiliations, not Islamist or secular designations, because the designations alienate too many. Tribal groups, unlike secularists, don’t ridicule Islam itself. They remain close to cultural values and make the important distinction that they advocate traditional Islam, which is closer to what is required to live in the real world than pure Islam regardless of sect. Islamists don’t have the broader appeal needed to include all tribal groups. It is important to note that to develop such a moderate government, the outlying groups must become involved; if the leadership remains concentrated the capital city, the leadership will be restricted and unrepresentative of the nation. Jordan’s greatest feat to date was, in empowering those traditionally not in power positions, to increase and widen participation and leadership in government.

Learning from the past is crucial, but obsessing over the past creates distrust and misguided agendas. Italy recently signed an agreement (Elegant Colonialism) to pay five billion dollars in compensation for its colonial rule and misdeeds in Libya. While I agree history must not be ignored, and on a surface level the restitution payment is an honorable gesture for Italy to make, it seems a little late in history for this money to affect those that were hurt most by Italian colonialism. There is no doubt that Italy damaged and retarded the native land and peoples of Libya. Italy, nonetheless, expects to reap great rewards from the agreement like multi-million dollar contracts and tighter security controls over the flow of illegal immigrants. It leaves you to wonder where this leads: if Italy is to go down a colonially themed memory lane, what about restitution for Somalia? There is no doubt Somalia, a former Italian colony, is one of the poorest, most unstable countries in Africa, Italian assistance would surely be of great assistance in Somalia.

In an article written for The Chronicle Review by Dinesh D’souza, Two Cheers for Colonialism, she concludes:

The academy needs to shed its irrational prejudice against colonialism. By providing a more balanced perspective, scholars can help to show the foolishness of policies like reparations as well as justifications of terrorism that are based on anti colonial myths. None of this is to say that colonialism by itself was a good thing, only that bad institutions sometimes produce good results. Colonialism, I freely acknowledge, was a harsh regime for those who lived under it.

While D’souza is referring to the Indian colonial experience, which lasted much longer than the Middle Eastern imperial experience, the message is the same: what’s done is done, it did produce some good results, and don’t get carried away in reaction to it to undo it.
The future is what Middle Easterners have control over, and it is in this realm the question of how the Middle East proceeds becomes so troubling. It is convenient to say “oh this should have happened” but much more difficult to make the decisions that decide the future. Outlying Middle Eastern countries have progressed more quickly in the last half of the century, because there have been incentives to do so. Advances like Turkey’s desired admission to the European Union, Georgia’s hope to be invited to NATO, and the success of federalist governed Iraq were motivated by outside influences. Intergovernmental organizations and institutions along with democratic governance provide the legitimacy and security to these Middle Eastern countries that is so desirable in a multi-polar world order.