As the Middle East appears to be plagued by a plethora of disasters, the centennial of the Sykes-Picot agreement would naturally be marked by all concerned with this region. The source of this concern is that the region is today the scene of the world's biggest conflicts. It is also because petroleum prices have plummeted (a similar intensity of interest has, in the past, been occasioned by soaring prices). In addition, the ideologies in the region can no longer be classified, in the European fashion, as right or left. Rather, they are a heady admixture of religion and Sunni-Shia conflicts, with some heavy doses of diverse terrorist practices and groups thrown in together with an assortment of warring races, ethnicities and sects. Sykes-Picot has thus assumed a prominent place on international media and research itineraries. This is after years of having been the “original sin” that, in the minds of pan-Arab nationalists, engendered all the dilemmas and geographic divisions, had it not been for which Arab unity would have thrived and prospered and the Arabs would not be in the wretched state they are in today. So the Sykes-Picot moulid is right on schedule. For those not familiar with Egyptian customs and traditions, a moulid is an annual feast day held to commemorate of the death of a holy man (not dissimilar in some ways to a Christian saint's day). Often it is believed that the rites of commemoration will bring positive results for one's health, livelihood, fertility or the wellbeing of one's children. These days, Western political literature is commemorating the Sykes-Picot moulid as a form of defence. The general line goes that, contrary to the Arab nationalists' claims, the agreement was not the source of all the evils in the region. Or, as the title of the 13 May article by Steven Cook and Amr Leheta in Foreign Policy puts it, “Don't blame Sykes-Picot for the Middle East's mess.” This agreement is “surely not the cause of the region's dysfunction,” the authors write. When French and British foreign ministers sat down to plot the borders of the Levant, they did not invent new boundaries. Rather, for the most part, they relied on pre-existing Ottoman administrative divisions. In like manner, Sykes-Picot did not invent the age-old conflicts and hatred between different groups, ethnicities and sects if, in the opinion of some, it unwittingly released these forces in the manner we see today. In fact, Cook and Leheta add: “Sykes and Picot never negotiated state borders per se, but rather zones of influence” for the two colonial powers, Britain and France. More remarkably, beneath the title “Pipelines in the Sand,” in the Foreign Affairs journal of 17 May, Rachel Havrelock writes that the Sykes-Picot agreement was not some random exercise in colonial mapmaking to carve up the Middle East into distributed spheres of influence. In fact, the secret agreement had “everything to do with oil”. France and the United Kingdom, as well as Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States, knew of the Middle East's vast petroleum fields and had already begun to establish major oil producing companies. What they needed now were political entities linked to oil production in the Kirkuk oil fields and to two pipelines, one leading from Kirkuk to Tripoli in northern Lebanon and the another from Kirkuk to Haifa and Acre in Palestine. The purpose of the states that emerged in this area was to grant legitimacy and ratify concessions for the oil production and distribution operations undertaken by transnational oil companies. “Despite its name, the Iraq Petroleum Company had nothing to do with Iraq,” Havrelock observes. “It was a consortium of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP), Calouste Gulbenkian, Compagnie Francais de Petrols (later Total), Standard Oil's Near East Development Corporation (later ExxonMobil), and Shell.” Jon Alterman, in the Washington DC-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) magazine, adopts a different approach by suggesting that the emergence of the states in the Middle East was not all that different from that of states elsewhere in the world where they evolved around major urban hubs that derived their strength and historic weight from the scale and scope of their economic, social and political activities. Just as it is impossible to imagine the rise of France without Paris, Italy without Rome, Russia without Moscow, Britain without London, Germany without Berlin or Austria without Vienna, it was Damascus that gave Syria its pivotal centre, just as Baghdad did for Iraq, Beirut for Lebanon and Jerusalem for Israel and Palestine. Thus, the forces of demographic, historical and economic evolution far outweighed the outputs of colonial designs. According to this perspective, the dilemma of the Middle Eastern states that emerged in the modern Middle East cannot be directly linked to agreements between colonial powers over the Arab Levant during the World War I period, at the time when these powers were preparing for the phase following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, what happened in the Arabian Peninsula, the Nile Valley and North Africa was all connected with historical developments dating back centuries (as in North Africa), or millennia (as is the case with Egypt). Moreover, if the Arab nationalists' notion of “imaginary” borders is valid for this region, it is just as valid for virtually all countries in the world. After all, states are political entities whose borders are demarcated on maps and shaped on the ground by the movements of armies, commercial prowess, political efficacy and balances of power. Cook and Leheta note a remarkable statistic: a quick Google search of the phrase “the end of Sykes-Picot” reveals over 8,600 mentions of this phrase in the past three years. In fact, it is impossible to understand the part this agreement played in the history of this region without placing it in the context of a collection of agreements that were no less historical in terms of their influence. More than a year before Sykes-Picot there was a series of communications known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. Dating from July 1915 to March 1916, the substance of these letters concerned British recognition of the Arabs' right to establish an Arabian kingdom. Subsequently, on 2 November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour issued the “Balfour Declaration” pledging Britain's commitment to the establishment of a “national homeland” for the Jews in Palestine. When thus set in its historical framework, Sykes-Picot reflects a general state of confusion among colonial powers as they sought to arrange things in the Levant (rather than the Middle East) to protect their strategic interests at a time when the Ottoman Empire was verging on collapse, and to promote their economic interests following the discovery of vast quantities of oil in the region. In the century since, much has changed. For one, many states that had no relation to the agreement, or that evolved from different agreements, have emerged. In all events, a closer study of the current state of the Levant and its painful circumstances might reveal that the Sykes-Picot agreement is one of the least important factors that has led to the conditions we see today. The writer is chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies.
