Middle East’s artificial borders crumble

They were created by imperial powers, but war and terrorism is posing risks to the shape and future of many nations, writes Shlomo Avineri

THE horror stories emerging from northern Iraq, as well as the continuing slaughter in Syria’s civil war, point to a tectonic shift in the Middle East. A hundred years after the First World War, the regional state system established after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is unravelling.

The contemporary map of the Middle East was drawn by the victorious Western imperial powers, Britain and France, during and after the First World War. Even as the war was still raging, they signed an agreement drafted by the diplomats Mark Sykes and François George-Picot, which delineated their respective spheres of influence across the Levant — an agreement that entirely disregarded the region’s history, ethnic, and religious traditions and affiliations, and the will of local populations.