Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East: Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi Borderlands, 1921–1946

In June 2006, the Armed Forces Journal published an article titled “Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look,” in which the author, retired US Army officer Ralph Peters, proposed radically redrawing the political boundaries of West Asia.1 Peters’s suggestions, outlined in a map that accompanied the piece, verged on the absurd. However, they drew on a persistent and widely held view that the origins of ongoing regional instability could be traced back to Britain and France’s partition of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War. Indeed, the idea that the international boundaries that have come to define the Middle East over the last century are artificial and unnatural imperialist impositions is shared by figures as diverse as American journalist Robin Wright and deceased Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.2 However, this perspective is perhaps most succinctly expressed by American historian, David Fromkin, author of one of the most influential volumes on postwar peace-making in the Middle East, who described the crucial period of state and boundary formation between 1914 and 1922 as “an era in which Middle Eastern countries and frontiers were fabricated in Europe.”3 Of course, this historical narrative has not gone unchallenged. As political scientist Sheri Berman points out, it is predicated on the erroneous belief that “states in other parts of the world, particularly in the West, were formed by the preferences of the people rather than the powerful.”4 This is undoubtedly an important observation, but Berman does not ultimately repudiate the idea that it was Europe’s unilateral imposition of “artificial borders” on the Middle East that dictated the post-Ottoman order.In this respect, Jordi Tejel’s Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East represents a more concerted effort to challenge this perspective regarding the processes that birthed the modern Middle East. Providing a detailed and wide-ranging study of the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands elaborated over seven chapters, Tejel charts its history between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. Although following a broadly chronological order, each chapter is distinguished by its thematic focus. In this way, the author examines the region’s history from multiple perspectives, drawing upon insights from a variety of distinct historical sub-fields.The book’s opening two chapters explore the inception of this borderland in the wake of the Ottoman collapse. Chapter 1 details the processes through which new international frontiers came into being, while Chapter 2 reflects on the impact of postwar refugee flows on these processes. Chapters 3 and 4 examine issues relating to interstate cooperation; detailing how Britain, France, and Turkey sought to manage the new frontiers as well as their efforts to deal with transnational issues such as cross-border criminality and disease control. Chapter 5 narrates the circumstances surrounding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, completed in 1940, and its somewhat contradictory effect on state consolidation in the borderlands. The book’s final two chapters analyze the influence of the geopolitical uncertainty brought about by the advent of the Second World War on the Iraqi-Turkish-Syrian frontier. Chapter 6 discusses attempts to revise political boundaries delineated in the early 1920s. This includes Turkey’s efforts to extract territorial concessions from Britain and France as well as the activities of non-state actors, most notably Armenian and Kurdish nationalists. The book’s seventh and final chapter focuses on the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC), established by Britain following the outbreak of the Second World War, investigating the impact of its attempts to increase agricultural production on the people of the borderland.In taking the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands as the unit of analysis, the author seeks to transcend “state-centric” approaches that have often prevailed in the study of state and border formation in the Middle East. This desire is evident in his efforts to combine strands of both micro- and global history throughout the book. This approach is deftly woven into the structure of each of the volume’s seven chapters. Each opens with a micro-history relating a specific set of events on the borderlands, vignettes that, at first glance, might seem hopelessly parochial. However, for Tejel, they are paradigmatic, serving as a point of departure from which to explore the complex interplay between the local, national, and global forces that shaped the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands. The result is a narrative that, while touching on numerous distinct historical questions, is united by two overarching themes.The first major theme is the dynamic nature of border formation and state territorialization. Indeed, Tejel calls on us to view the borders that came to define the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi frontier as “elusive” rather than “artificial,” a perspective that provides “an entry point into the ideal of making the territorial nation-state an ongoing process” (19). Thus, while it might be assumed that these processes followed a progressive and unilinear path—one that served to undermine, or indeed sever, transnational connections—Tejel’s paints a more fluid picture. One such example of these complexities can be found in the book’s treatment of the Baghdad Railway that traversed the tri-border area. On one level, the expansion of rail and road networks into the periphery of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq singled an intensification of state territorialization, with trains and buses becoming mobile borders. However, simultaneously, these new transportation networks also provide opportunities for the strengthening of cross-border networks, serving to “reconnect social and economic links that had been severed by the newly established borders” (221). Another can be found in Tejel’s analysis of the MESC, which he argues facilitated two contradictory processes. On one hand, it encouraged “re-bordering . . . in the face of Axis allies and neutrals’ challenges. . . .” Yet, at the same time, the organization’s efforts to facilitate the circulation of men and material for the war effort also increased “regional interdependency—that is, the process of de-bordering” (281–82).The second major theme is that of agency. As with other works within the burgeoning field of borderland studies, a central concern is the role of those residing in the borderlands in shaping the historical process. Although noting that the demands of borderlanders’ were not necessarily “more important” than those of states, Tejel seeks to demonstrate the ways in which “state formation processes have been simultaneously adopted and re-shaped from below” (30). For Tejel, the creation of the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi frontier following the end of the First World War was not simply the imposition of outside powers on a passive population. Rather they were the product of a dialectical process shaped by interactions between state authorities and borderland communities. For instance, even as states sought to exploit the flows of refugees that accompanied the Ottoman collapse as a means to consolidate their national and colonial projects, ongoing territorial indeterminacy and the fluidity of ethnonational identities provided opportunities for some inhabitants of the borderlands to act as “courters of nationality,” weighing up the “advantages between diverse offers of nationality” (122). Moreover, throughout the interwar period and despite efforts at interstate cooperation, a persistent lack of men and material combined with the ongoing local resistance forced Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi authorities into compromise with local forces as a foundational part of their strategies of border management. In short, the residents of borderlands were not simply acted upon but, at times, had to be courted, co-opted, flattered, and assuaged.Nowhere is this more evident than in the book’s opening chapter, which is of particular significance as it engages with the much-discussed circumstances surrounding the delineation of the Syrian–Turkish and Iraqi–Turkish frontier in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Prevailing historical narratives have often portrayed this process as one hammered out in the conference rooms of Europe: the work of British, French, and Turkish diplomats and officials seeking to advance the interests of their respective states in a global context increasingly shaped by Wilsonian idealism. In contrast, Tejel begins not in Paris or Geneva but Jaziret ibn Umar, a small town on the yet-to-be-delineated Iraqi–Turkish border, which, according to a British intelligence report from spring 1919, served as a hub for Turkish efforts to propagate anti-British sentiment among the local Kurdish tribesmen. While seemingly a minor historical footnote, Tejel uses the case of Turkish attempts to win over Kurdish tribesmen as a means to subvert British influence, to illustrate a dynamic often lost to those who look at boundary-making from the perspective of the diplomatic historian. As Britain, France, and Turkey sought to advance their overlapping territorial claims in the critical period between 1918 and 1925, they were forced to negotiate with and vie for the affection of a myriad of tribal chiefs and local dignitaries lest they shift their allegiances to a rival power. Of course, as Tejel notes, such an agency was not without unforeseen consequences. Somewhat ironically, the ongoing rivalries between the imperial powers and Turkey, which had provided local actors with the ability to maintain and expand their autonomy, ultimately provided central governments with the impetus “to search for a solution based on the principle of territorial sovereignty within an international system of nation states” (70). To purloin a Marxian turn of phrase, “borderlanders make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”Overall, there is little doubt that Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East is a major scholarly achievement. Supported by extensive original research conducted in British, French, German, and Turkish archives, Tejel presents a vivid account of the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands at a critical historical juncture. Moreover, he offers valuable insights into historiographical questions pertaining to state sovereignty, identity formation, and territoriality. However, perhaps most importantly, the book provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics that gave rise to the contours of the modern Middle East, a perspective that highlights the role of borderland communities in this process. In doing so, Tejel presents a powerful challenge to the widely held notion that the post-Ottoman order was a unilateral imposition of the imperial powers. In this regard, Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East will be of interest not only to regional specialists but all those wishing to understand the forces that fashioned the Middle East’s current geopolitical order.