Nick Danforth
In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian
named Henry King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out the
Middle East. Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the
region’s political future was uncertain, and the two men seemed to provide the
necessary combination of business acumen and biblical knowledge. King and
Crane’s quest was to find out how the region’s residents wanted to be governed.
It would be a major test of Wilson’s belief in national self-determination: the
idea that every people should get its own state with clearly defined borders.
Interactive map: How the King-Crane Commission envisioned
the Middle East (Karl Sturm and Nick Danforth)
After spending three weeks interviewing religious and
community leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Turkey, the two
men and their team proposed that the Ottoman lands be divided as shown in the
map above. Needless to say, the proposals were disregarded. In accordance with
the Sykes-Picot Agreement Britain and France had drafted in secret in 1916,
Britain and France ultimately took over the region as so-called mandate or caretaker
powers. The French-administered region would later become Lebanon and Syria,
and the British region would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq.
Today, many argue that a century of untold violence and
instability—culminating in ISIS’s brutal attempt t0 erase Middle Eastern
borders—might have been avoided if only each of the region’s peoples had
achieved independence after World War I. But as the King-Crane Commission
discovered back in 1919, ethnic and religious groups almost never divide
themselves into discrete units. Nor do the members of each group necessarily
share a vision of how they wish to be governed.
The King-Crane report is still a striking document—less
for what it reveals about the Middle East as it might have been than as an
illustration of the fundamental dilemmas involved in drawing, or not drawing,
borders. Indeed, the report insisted on forcing people to live together through
complicated legal arrangements that prefigure more recent proposals.
Among other things, the authors concluded that dividing
Iraq into ethnic enclaves was too absurd to merit discussion. Greeks and Turks
only needed one country because the “two races supplement each other.” The
Muslims and Christians of Syria needed to learn to “get on together in some
fashion” because “the whole lesson of modern social consciousness points to the
necessity of understanding ‘the other half,’ as it can be understood only by
close and living relations.”
But the commissioners also realized that simply lumping
diverse ethnic or religious groups together in larger states could lead to
bloody results. Their report proposed all sorts of ideas for tiered,
overlapping mandates or bi-national federated states, ultimately endorsing a
vision that could be considered either pre- or post-national, depending on
one’s perspective. In addition to outlining several autonomous regions, they
proposed that Constantinople (now Istanbul) become an international territory
administered by the League of Nations, since “no one nation can be equal to the
task” of controlling the city and its surrounding straits, “least of all a
nation with Turkey’s superlatively bad record of misrule.” Although the authors
had been tasked with drawing borders, it seems that once they confronted the
many dilemmas of implementing self-determination, they developed a more fluid
approach to nationhood and identity.
Disagreement among the region’s residents about their own
future certainly helped the commission reach this conclusion. The commissioners
traveled from city to city accepting petitions and taking testimony, compiling
a rare record of Arab popular opinion from the period. This early polling
exercise captured a wide range of views—some overlapping, some irreconcilable.
Today's Middle East (Wikimedia)
Some 80 percent of those interviewed favored the
establishment of a “United Syria”—an outcome that, far from settling the
question of what self-determination would look like, forced the commission to
wrestle with the crucial issue of what should happen to minorities. Many of the
Christians living in this hypothetical future state, particularly those in the
Mount Lebanon region, spoke out forcefully against being part of a larger,
Muslim-dominated entity. Many called for an “Independent Greater Lebanon,”
whose territory would be roughly equivalent to that of the modern state of
Lebanon.
The commissioners’ proposed solution was to grant Lebanon
“a sufficient measure of local autonomy” so as not to “diminish the security of
[its] inhabitants.” But their explanation for why this autonomy should fall
short of complete independence seems to challenge the logic of
self-determination: “Lebanon would be in a position to exert a stronger and
more helpful influence if she were within the Syrian state, feeling its
problems and needs and sharing all its life, instead of outside it, absorbed
simply in her own narrow concerns.”
The broader conclusion they reached about human affairs
was similarly at odds with the principle of self-determination, and it
anticipated the 21st century’s recurring debates about where the Middle East’s
borders really belong. “No doubt the quick mechanical solution of the problem
of difficult relations is to split the people up into little independent
fragments,” they wrote. “But in general, to attempt complete separation only
accentuates the differences and increases the antagonism.” Even when they
conceded exceptions—for instance, in the “imperative and inevitable” separation
of the Turks and Armenians given the Turks’ “terrible massacres” and “cruelties
horrible beyond description”—King, Crane, and their team nonetheless concluded
that “a separation ... involves very difficult problems” and could easily
backfire.
Ultimately, the King-Crane proposal relied on European or
American supervision, through the mandate system, to fudge different degrees of
sovereignty and ensure minority rights in multi-national states. Placing
different mandates under the same mandatory power became an easy way to
separate peoples while maintaining an administrative link between them: Syria
and Mesopotamia, for instance, could both be under British supervision, while
Turkey and Armenia could both be overseen by the United States. There is a
telling condescension to the commissioners’ insistence on foreign
administration as the best way to implement “self-determination,” but it wasn’t
that different from the widely shared belief at the time that oversight from a
supra-national body like the League of Nations would also be necessary to
ensure minority rights in the new nations of Eastern Europe.
In some ways, it also wasn’t that different from the
British and French belief, evident in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that continued
imperial rule was necessary to manage local differences. There are echoes of
this conviction in the anti-nationalist imperial nostalgia that exists in some
quarters today. Indeed, part of the reason the British and French felt so
comfortable drawing "arbitrary" borders was that they believed they
would remain in a position to manage relations across them. In this sense,
Anglo-French imperialism relied on controlling borders and suppressing
self-determination within the region, while the King-Crane commission was more
interested in trying to find a balance between them.
The zones of influence established by the Sykes-Picot
Agreement. The dark pink represents a region of direct British control, with
the lighter pink a British zone of influence. Dark blue represents an area of
direct French control, with the French zone of influence in lighter blue.
(Wikimedia)
This balance has yet to be achieved. Today, some people
argue that Iraq would be better off divided into smaller states, and that Syria
might split up on its own, while others—including ISIS—have insisted that the
solution is to do away entirely with borders like the one between Iraq and
Syria and to create a much larger entity. But both solutions, along with the
countless alternative maps proposed for the region, remain focused on redrawing
borders rather than transcending them. And for what it’s worth, neither a
subdivided Syria nor a union between Syria and Mesopotamia were outcomes that
many locals campaigned for when King and Crane came to visit.
All of this suggests a need to look beyond the current
paradigm of borders. The people of Scotland, for example, recently decided that
their preferred relationship with London involved a mix of dependence and
independence rather than leaving the U.K. altogether or allowing England to
have total sovereignty over their affairs. And in Syria, a federated
arrangement that parcels out control of the country’s territory without
breaking it apart could be a faster route to peace than complete victory by any
one side.
Of course, recognizing the limitations of nation-states,
in the Middle East or elsewhere, does not imply that with a little more
foresight the Arab world could have transitioned directly from Ottoman
imperialism to post-national European modernity. Historical forces worked
against implementing more flexible alternatives to the nation-state system
then, and they still do today. But the current regional uncertainty may require
the same kind of imagination the King-Crane commission brought to its analysis.
A century later, it’s clear that the question of what political arrangements
can help people “get on together in some fashion” remains just as difficult as
ever.
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Nick Danforth is a doctoral candidate in Turkish history
at Georgetown University. He writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and
maps at midafternoonmap.com.
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