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The map behind Middle East troubles

Border lines drawn with a ruler in WW1 still rock the region

BBC Online
A map marked with crude chinagraph-pencil in the second decade of the 20th Century shows the ambition - and folly - of the 100-year old British-French plan that helped create the modern-day Middle East.
The key tenets of the 1916 agreement Mark Sykes (representing the British government) and Francois Georges-Picot (from the French government) had negotiated in relative haste amidst the turmoil of the World War One continue to influence the region to this day, and poses three problems with the geo-political order.
First, it was secret without any Arabic knowledge, and it negated Britain's main promise to the Arabs in the 1910s of independence if they rebelled against the Ottomans and brought the empire down.
That independence not materialising after WW1 was a key factor behind the rise of the militarist regimes that had come to dominate many Arab countries from the 1950s until the 2011 Arab uprisings. Arab politics - in North Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean - took a gradual, yet decisive, turn from building liberal constitutional governance systems to asserting nationalism - whose main objective was getting rid of the colonialists. The second problem lay in the tendency to draw straight lines. The thinking behind Sykes-Picot did not translate into practice, meaning the newly created borders did not correspond to the actual sectarian, tribal, or ethnic distinctions on the ground.
The third problem was that the state system that was created after WW1 has exacerbated the Arabs' failure to address the crucial dilemma of the century and a half old identity struggle between, on one hand nationalism and secularism, and on the other, Islamism (and in some cases Christianism).
Despite major advancements in industrialisation, the dramatic inequity between the upper middle classes and the vast majority of the populations continued. The strong men of Arab nationalism championed a different (socialist, and at times militarist) narrative, but at the expense of civil and political freedoms.
That state structure was poised for explosion, and the changing demographics proved to be the trigger.
Over the past four decades, the Arab world has doubled its population with two-thirds of them being under 35 years old - a generation that has inherited acute socio-economic and political problems that it did not contribute to, and yet has been living its consequences.
At core, the wave of Arab uprisings that commenced in 2011 is this generation's attempt at changing the consequences of the state order that began in the aftermath of WWI.
This currently unfolding transformation entails the promise of a new generation searching for a better future, and the peril of a wave of chaos that could engulf the region for several years.