A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Palestine was another case in point: in 1922 Britain accepted a League of Nations Mandate to carry out a Zionist program that she had vigorously espoused in 1917—but for which she had lost all enthusiasm in the early 1920s.

  It was no wonder, then, that in the years to come British officials were to govern the Middle East with no great sense of direction or conviction. It was a consequence of a peculiarity of the settlement of 1922: having destroyed the old order in the region, and having deployed troops, armored cars, and military aircraft everywhere from Egypt to Iraq, British policy-makers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in 1922 in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed.

  V

  The Middle East became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would permanently endure. During and after the First World War, Britain and her Allies destroyed the old order in the region irrevocably; they smashed Turkish rule of the Arabic-speaking Middle East beyond repair.* To take its place, they created countries, nominated rulers, delineated frontiers, and introduced a state system of the sort that exists everywhere else; but they did not quell all significant local opposition to those decisions.

  As a result the events of 1914–22, while bringing to an end Europe’s Middle Eastern Question, gave birth to a Middle Eastern Question in the Middle East itself. The settlement of 1922 (as it is called here, even though some of the arrangements were arrived at a bit earlier or a bit later) resolved, as far as Europeans were concerned, the question of what—as well as who—should replace the Ottoman Empire; yet even today there are powerful local forces within the Middle East that remain unreconciled to these arrangements—and may well overthrow them.

  Some of the disputes, like those elsewhere in the world, are about rulers or frontiers, but what is typical of the Middle East is that more fundamental claims are also advanced, drawing into question not merely the dimensions and boundaries, but the right to exist, of countries that immediately or eventually emerged from the British and French decisions of the early 1920s: Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. So at this point in the twentieth century, the Middle East is the region of the world in which wars of national survival are still being fought with some frequency.

  The disputes go deeper still: beneath such apparently insoluble, but specific, issues as the political future of the Kurds or the political destiny of the Palestinian Arabs, lies the more general question of whether the transplanted modern system of politics invented in Europe—characterized, among other things, by the division of the earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship—will survive in the foreign soil of the Middle East.

  In the rest of the world European political assumptions are so taken for granted that nobody thinks about them anymore; but at least one of these assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.

  European statesmen of the First World War era did—to some extent—recognize the problem and its significance. As soon as they began to plan their annexation of the Middle East, Allied leaders recognized that Islam’s hold on the region was the main feature of the political landscape with which they would have to contend. Lord Kitchener, it will be remembered, initiated in 1914 a policy designed to bring the Moslem faith under Britain’s sway. When it looked as though that might not work—for the Sherif Hussein’s call to the Faithful in 1916 fell on deaf ears—Kitchener’s associates proposed instead to sponsor other loyalties (to a federation of Arabic-speaking peoples, or to the family of King Hussein, or to about-to-be-created countries such as Iraq) as a rival to pan-Islam. Indeed they framed the postwar Middle East settlement with that object (among others) in view.

  However, European officials at the time had little understanding of Islam. They were too easily persuaded that Moslem opposition to the politics of modernization—of Europeanization—was vanishing. Had they been able to look ahead to the last half of the twentieth century, they would have been astonished by the fervor of the Wahhabi faith in Saudi Arabia, by the passion of religious belief in warring Afghanistan, by the continuing vitality of the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Sunni world, and by the recent Khomeini upheaval in Shi’ite Iran.

  Continuing local opposition, whether on religious grounds or others, to the settlement of 1922 or to the fundamental assumptions upon which it was based, explains the characteristic feature of the region’s politics: that in the Middle East there is no sense of legitimacy—no agreement on rules of the game—and no belief, universally shared in the region, that within whatever boundaries, the entities that call themselves countries or the men who claim to be rulers are entitled to recognition as such. In that sense, successors to the Ottoman sultans have not yet been permanently installed, even though—between 1919 and 1922—installing them was what the Allies believed themselves to be doing.

  It may be that one day the challenges to the 1922 settlement—to the existence of Jordan, Israel, Iraq, and Lebanon, for example, or to the institution of secular national governments in the Middle East—will be withdrawn. But if they continue in full force, then the twentieth-century Middle East will eventually be seen to be in a situation similar to Europe’s in the fifth century AD, when the collapse of the Roman Empire’s authority in the West threw its subjects into a crisis of civilization that obliged them to work out a new political system of their own. The European experience suggests what the dimensions of such a radical crisis of political civilization might be.

  It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete.

  The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed. The Allies proposed a post-Ottoman design for the region in the early 1920s. The continuing question is whether the peoples of the region will accept it.

  The settlement of 1922, therefore, does not belong entirely or even mostly to the past; it is at the very heart of current wars, conflicts, and politics in the Middle East, for the questions that Kitchener, Lloyd George, and Churchill opened up are even now being contested by force of arms, year after year, in the ruined streets of Beirut, along the banks of the slow-moving Tigris—Euphrates, and by the waters of the Biblical Jordan.

  VI

  British politicians and officials of the early 1920s did not foresee the problematical future of the 1922 settlement. They did not even foresee the immediate political future of those personally involved in it—among them, Winston Churchill, a principal architect of the settlement—although these were matters closer at hand, and with which they were more intimately familiar than the politics of the Middle East.

  In 1922 it was almost universally agreed in Britain
that Churchill was politically finished. Churchill, who had lost his seat in the Cabinet in October and his seat in the Commons in November, appeared crushed. While he did not doubt that he could re-enter Parliament at some point, it seemed unlikely that he would ever again be invited to serve in a government—at least in any major capacity.

  A dinner companion of Churchill’s at the end of November later remembered that “Winston was so down in the dumps he could scarcely speak the whole evening. He thought his world had come to an end—at least his political world. I thought his career was over.”1

  The new Parliament assembled on 27 November 1922, but Churchill was not a member of it, so there was nothing to keep him in Britain. At the beginning of December, he sailed for the Mediterranean. It was only a decade since, in the early summer of his career, he had cruised the Mediterranean aboard Enchantress with young Violet Asquith and her father; but that earlier cruise had taken place, politically speaking, in another century—indeed, in another world.

  Once he had arrived in the south of France, Churchill settled in a rented villa near Cannes and resumed work on his war memoirs—a project that he had commenced earlier. He was far enough along with it so that he believed the opening sections would be ready for newspaper serialization in about a month. It was to be a work in many volumes.

  In the course of composing his memoirs, he reflected on the unaccountable run of bad luck he had encountered in all that touched and concerned the Turkish East. He recalled the accidents, confusions, and blunders that had allowed the Goeben to reach Constantinople and help push the Ottoman Empire into the war—a war for which he, Churchill, had been personally blamed. He reflected on the almost unbelievable behavior of his admirals at the Dardanelles in fleeing the Narrows—the day before they might have won the Turkish war, and earned him the laurels of victory, instead of disgrace and dismissal. He told his readers how a monkey bit the King of Greece and caused the renewed Turkish war that brought down the Lloyd George government—and himself with it.

  Once he had completed and published the first volume of these memoirs, Churchill returned to Britain, in the middle of 1923, to the apparently hopeless political wars. In the late autumn he stood for Parliament once again, was continuously heckled about the wartime Dardanelles failure, and was defeated by the Labour candidate. In late winter he stood for election again, in another constituency, and was again defeated, this time by a Conservative.

  But Churchill’s situation was changing. In late 1924 he returned to Parliament; and the political world was astounded to hear that Winston Churchill—far from being politically finished—had become Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position usually deemed to be the second most important in the Cabinet.

  The clouds began to part, and a former colleague on the Liberal benches, George Lambert, writing to congratulate him on the new appointment, foresaw an even more astonishing eventuality. “Winston my boy,” he wrote, “I have got a fair instinct for politics. I think I shall live to see you Prime Minister.”2

  AFTERWORD TO THE 2009 EDITION

  As readers of this book know, the modern Middle East was created in the aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918). Before the war, the political landscape of the Arabic-speaking Middle East looked far different than it does today. Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia did not exist. All of them belonged to the Turkish-speaking Ottoman Empire; and had done so for hundreds of years—until the Ottomans lost them.

  Who created the modern Middle East, how it happened, and why it happened, is the story that is told in A Peace to End All Peace (“Peace”), a narrative history that was published in the summer of 1989 and that has been continuously in print ever since. The book was glowingly reviewed and greatly praised. Now, twenty years later, what, if anything, would we wish to add?

  Readers learned from Peace that England and France, in winning the First World War, instead of restoring the Ottoman Empire, had chosen to destroy it. The war left the western Europeans as occupiers, responsible for governing the region. Christians ruled Muslims. It was not a situation with which either side was enormously happy. Each side blamed the other.

  The British and French invading armies in the 1914 war found Middle Eastern populations whose politics, like their lives, were focused on religion. The Europeans tried to bring their politics with them—their secularism, their nationalism, their alliance systems—and found they did not transplant easily into foreign soil. What was most objectionable, however, from a Middle Eastern point of view, was that the local populations now were ruled by aliens. Rule by foreigners is something that is bitterly resented anywhere in the world—and is hated by Muslims more than by most.

  England and France had not gone to war in the first place in order to change the politics or the political map of the Middle East. Nonetheless, that is what they ended up doing. A combination of the actions taken by the European Allies, of the agreements reached, and of the decisions taken, had by the early 1920s formed a sort of overall peace settlement in the Middle East. Many elements of this settlement fell into place in and around 1922. In Peace this cluster of changes therefore is termed “the Settlement of 1922.”

  There was a good deal wrong with the Settlement—at least when viewed through our eyes today. States were created and boundaries were drawn in pursuit of British and French interests rather than those of the populations concerned. Decisions frequently were made by Allied officials and cabinet ministers who knew little of the region or of its needs. It could well be argued that, as foreigners, these decision-makers were unqualified to interfere in the lives of the people who lived there.

  However, there was an even more deadly flaw in the settlement: in Britain, for reasons that readers of Peace will know, official and political opinion turned against the Settlement of 1922 almost as soon as it was adopted. When a policy is entrusted to officials who do not believe in it, it is carried out badly—or is not carried out at all. All of this is familiar to Peace’s readers.

  Before World War I, the Middle East had been somnolent. After the United States took over Britain’s hegemonic position in the region, between the middle 1940s and the middle 1950s, it became turbulent. When Peace first appeared twenty years ago, the Gulf War, begun in 1991, ushered in an era of an ever-increasing disorder in the region, which eventually spilled over to the rest of the world under the general heading of “9/11.” Was it because something was wrong with the Settlement of 1922? Or was something wrong with the people for whom it was drawn? Why did it work for some Middle Eastern countries—but not for others? These were issues beyond the scope of Peace, but of great importance today.

  The issue on which some parts of the Middle East come together, while others come apart, is legitimacy. Some have achieved it. Others have not. Some neighboring states accept the line of their frontier. Others do not. Some accept their neighbors as independent states. Others do not.

  Uninterrupted possession tends to give good title; thus eternal Egypt and imperial Persia, survivors of the ancient world, remain unquestioned in their claims to statehood. New states thrown up by strongmen tend to be accepted too, so long as the men really are strong and really are indigenous: one thinks of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s Turkish Republic and Abdul Aziz ibn Saud’s Saudi Arabia. It is a third category that does not seem to command acceptance: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel provide examples. These are children of England and France, born of the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreement as amended; and it is frequently suggested that it is their provenance that lies at the heart of the problem. But examples drawn from other regions suggest that while that is so, it is not necessarily so.

  The redrawing of the Middle East was not the first such episode to occur in modern history. European imperialism had left behind similar questions to be contested in other distant lands. Latin America was the first region to be decolonized in modern times beginning with Haiti and the Spanish colonies in the early 1800s. Over the course of the previous four hundred years, f
rom the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Europeans had imposed their own internal boundaries on the virgin map of South America, often for reasons of mere administrative convenience; and if the native peoples had taken up arms in an attempt to achieve states and boundaries corresponding to their political realities and to their nationalist dreams—as the nations of Europe had done, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789—bloodbaths would have been perpetual throughout South America. That would have been a Balkan path; and it would have led to a hundred Sarajevos.

  Instead, the countries of the Latin south abided by an optional principle of public international law known as Uti Possidetis Juris. Drawn from Roman law, it accepts the political structure of the region at the time of decolonization, and embodies a piece of ancient wisdom: God told Lot’s wife not to look back. Latin America recognized that seeking to bring back yesterday can risk losing today and tomorrow.

  When Africa, in its turn, underwent decolonization starting in the 1960s, it too turned to Uti Possidetis Juris. The political realities of Africa are tribal, but for each tribe to battle for supremacy within its ancestral frontiers would mean disaster, and in some occasions has in fact meant disaster. At the first conference of African states, in setting up the Organization of African Unity in 1963, Africa opted for Uti Possidetis. Decisions of the International Court of Justice have affirmed the legal rule’s continuing validity in the context of decolonization. Two continents—Africa and South America—continue to live with it.