The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (24 page)

The seventeenth century began with a concession of equality; it ended with an admission of defeat. In the peace of Carlowitz, of 1699, the Ottoman Empire was compelled for the first time to sign a treaty on terms imposed by a victorious enemy. For the first time, too, the Ottomans tried to use the processes of diplomatic negotiation and the good offices of friendly neutrals to secure some alleviation of the penalties of defeat. The foreign policy of the late Ottoman Empire was beginning to take shape.

During the sixteenth century, a functionary appeared in the office of the grand vizier in Istanbul called the chief secretary (Reis iil-Kuttab), usually known as the reis efendi, and concerned with foreign affairs. He was a comparatively minor functionary, and for eign affairs were only one of his concerns. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he gained in rank, and foreign affairs bulked larger among his preoccupations. He was assisted by the chief dragoman. In earlier days this was usually a renegade European Christian, but from the mid-seventeenth century the office was monopolized by the aristocratic Greek families of the Phanar quarter of Istanbul, who brought it almost to the level of a ministry of foreign affairs.

Yet in spite of these developments, the notions of foreign policy and international relations remained alien to the Ottomans, and perhaps the best proof of this is their willingness to entrust these matters to members of the Christian Greek minority. Several European states had maintained resident consuls and ambassadors in Istanbul since the sixteenth century, and their number was steadily increasing, but the Ottomans were content to send an occasional special mission to Europe and made no attempt to establish resident embassies until 1793, when Yusuf Agah set up house in London.

A few years previously, the Ottomans had made their first essays in the European power game. The empire was at war with Russia and Austria; it seemed a good idea to conclude treaties with Sweden, which was also at war with Russia, and Prussia, which could bring useful pressure to bear on Austria. Treaties with these two countries were signed in 1789 and 1790, respectively. The idea of a military alliance with Christian powers was new and, to some of the ulema, unacceptable. The military judge Shanizade Efendi denounced it as contrary to holy law, citing as authority the Qur'anic verse "0 you who believe! Do not take my enemies and your enemies as friends!" (Qur'an 60.1 ). He was overruled by the chief mufti, who cited the tradition that "God will help the cause of Islam with men who are not of it," as well as other legal texts and arguments.'

The lesson was quickly learned. Only a few years later, in 1798, the empire was invited to join the coalition against the new menace of the French Revolution. The reis efendi, Ahmed Atif, in a memorandum presented to the divan, recommended acceptance but remarked:

Every state must have two kinds of policy. One is the permanent policy, which is taken as the foundation of all its actions and activities; the other is a temporary policy, followed for a period in accordance with the requirements of the time and circumstances. The permanent policy of the empire is to prevent any increase in the strength of Russia and Austria, which by virtue of their position are its natural enemies, and to be allied with those states that might be able to break their power and are thus the natural friends of the empire. But in the present time and circumstances, the policy more conducive to the interests of the empire is, first, to exert its strength to extinguish this fire of sedition and evil and, then, this purpose having been accomplished, to act once more as required by its permanent policy.'

In the course of the nineteenth century, the main lines of the "permanent policy" of Turkey were confirmed by practice and experience. Russia, advancing relentlessly toward the south, was the main danger and enemy; any power willing and able to give aid against Russia was a potential friend. Turkey's alliances have changed, but their purpose has remained constant. After Prussia and Sweden, it was the turn of France and still more of Britain, which defended Turkey against Russia by force of arms in 1854 to 1856, by threats or diplomacy in 1878 and on other occasions. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Britain and France were replaced as Turkey's allies by Germany, now regarded as the main bulwark against Russia. That alliance ended with the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918.

The revolutions in Russia and Anatolia, on the one hand, and the Allied occupation of Istanbul, on the other, created a new situation in which a temporary coincidence of interests brought a temporary cooperation between the two revolutionary regimes. It ended when both of them overcame their enemies and gradually returned to what Atif Efendi would have called the "permanent policies" of their two countries. Already at the Lausanne Conference in 1923, there was a chill in the relations between Russia, now firmly established in the Black Sea, and Turkey, now fully in control of Istanbul and the Straits. The Anglo-Turkish dispute over Mosul in 1924 and 1925 brought a renewal of Turco-Soviet friendship, which, however, faltered under the impact of the Communist ideological offensive against Kemal and his regime in 1928 and 1929. The capitalist depression and the Turkish adoption of etatisme brought some revival, which was further encouraged by a common mistrust of Italian fascist activities in Ethiopia and Spain.

That friendship came to an end in 1939, when the scanty reserve of goodwill built up during the period of revolutionary fraternity was finally dissipated by Soviet hectoring and demands. The ambiguities of Turkish policy during the war years were due largely to uncertainty as to which of the contending blocs was to be the bulwark of Turkey against Russian attack-to fulfill the role of Britain in 1854 and 1878, of Germany in 1914. It was soon apparent that that role had fallen to the United States. The role was understood and accepted. In April 1946, in response to threatening Soviet words and actions, President Truman sent the battleship Missouri on a courtesy visit to Istanbul, where it was enthusiastically welcomed. On March 12, he announced a program of military and economic aid to Turkey. Known as the Truman Doctrine, it marked the beginning of massive U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Middle East and of a growing role for Turkey in the whole plan of Western defense. A new and close relationship developed between Turkey and the United States, which continued until the end of the Cold War and beyond.

At the time when the Napoleonic wars involved the Middle East for the first time in the European game of power politics and war, there was only one other independent state in the area-Iran. More remote from Europe than was the Ottoman Empire, its knowledge of European affairs was less direct, its reaction to them less sophisticated. Its problems, however, were not dissimilar. Iran, too, was threatened from the north, where the Russians had annexed several provinces and were penetrating others by both political and economic means. Like the Turks, the Iranians looked to the West for guarantees, but were usually unable to get them. Germany was too far away to offer effective help; Britain fought shy of too close an involvement in Iranian affairs. There were, moreover, many Iranians who saw in the British Empire in India as great a danger to them as in the Russian Empire to the north.

The guiding lines of Iranian foreign policy were to seek support against Russia or, failing that, to play the two neighboring empires off against each other. They acquired great skill and at times won considerable success in this latter role. But the game was dangerous, and their successes were precarious. The Iranian position in Asia was in some respects rather like that of the Poles in eastern Europe. As long as their two mighty neighbors differed, they could survive and might even profit. But if ever their two neighbors agreed, they were in danger of being submerged. This danger arose in an acute form at the time of the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. This agreement between their rival imperial neighbors was, with some reason, seen by Iranians as a mortal threat to their independence. The lesson was driven home during the First World War, when a nominally neutral Iran became an unofficial battleground, with the Russians from the north, the British from the south, and the Turks and their German allies from the west roving at will and skirmishing against one another. It was not until 1926 that Reza Shah, founder of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty, was able to reunite the realm and restore full sovereignty. Again in the Second World War, the Russians and the British, in unwonted and uneasy alliance, invaded and occupied Iran, deposed the shah and installed his son, and operated the transit routes that were their main objective. To the great relief of the Iranians, the Russians and the British resumed their normal hostility when the war ended. The British withdrew at once; it took rather longer, and some American help, to persuade the Russians to go.

The independence and partition of India in 1947 created an entirely new situation. In the place of the British Empire, there were now two, later three, rival states in the Indian subcontinent, none of them strong enough to constitute an effective counterpoise to the Soviet Union. The power in the north remained, and Iranian statesmen, alarmed by the Azerbaijan crisis of 1945 to 1946 and the Soviet oil concession crisis of 1946 and 1947, began to look for a new counterpoise. The Turkish precedent showed them in what direction to look. Once before, in 1911, the Iranians had turned to an American expert for advice and help against their two neighbors. In October 1947, they turned to America again for support against the one that remained. The agreement of 6 October, providing for an American military mission and the purchase of American arms, was a first step. The Anglo-Iranian oil crisis of 1951 and the temporary ousting of the shah interrupted this process, but after his restoration, with American help, in 1953, the policy of alignment with the West was continued until the Islamic revolution of 1979, after which the new rulers of Iran adopted and maintained a position of unremitting hostility to the West in general and to the United States in particular.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were only two powers in the Middle East with the need for a foreign policy-Turkey and Iran. In the course of the century, a third was added-Egypt. Under the rule of Muhammad `Ali and his successors, Egypt, though not fully independent, acquired a considerable measure of autonomy, enough to permit the tentative emergence of an Egyptian foreign policy, or rather, of an Egyptian policy toward the other countries of the Middle East.

As early as the ninth century, Egypt had become an independent center of power in the Middle Eastern Islamic world, and a succession of dynasties ruling in Egypt had sketched and filled in the outlines of an Egyptian policy. The concerns that inspired it were determined by the geopolitical realities of Egypt and reveal a remarkable consistency from remote antiquity to the present day.

Under the Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt until 1517, even nominal allegiance to an outside suzerain was ended, and Cairo became the capital of the major Muslim power in the region until the rise of the Ottomans. Rulers of Syria, as well as of Egypt, it was they who halted the Mongol westward advance and ejected the last remnants of the Crusades. Masters of Mecca and Medina, they made use, on occasion, of the title Khadim al-Haramayn, the Servitor of the Two Holy Places. The claim to Islamic precedence that this implied was given formal expression through the establishment in Cairo, under their aegis, of a line of puppet caliphs claiming to be the legitimate heirs of the great caliphs of Baghdad.

All this ended with the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Egypt, along with its Syrian and Arabian dependencies, became part of the Ottoman Empire, and the title Servitor of the Two Holy Places was assumed by the sultan Selim I. But under the Ottoman sultans, as centuries earlier under the Abbasid caliphs, Egypt could not indefinitely endure the status of a province. By the eighteenth century, the rulers of Egypt, while nominally governing on behalf of the sultan, in fact exercised a large measure of independence, and despite their mostly non-Egyptian origin began to pursue traditional Egyp- tain policies.

A new phase began with Muhammad `Ali, a military commander of Balkan origin, who made himself master of Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At home, in a prefigurement of what later came to be known as Arab socialism, he tried to establish his regime economically by abolishing the old system of land tenure and revenue collection, concentrating the ownership of most land in his own hands, organizing state monopolies of trade, and building factories and industries under state auspices. Abroad, he established relations with a number of powers and embarked on a series of military and political adventures in Arabia, the Sudan, Algeria, and, above all, Syria. Although most of these adventures failed, he succeeded in founding a new state, dynastic but also Egyptian, over which his descendants ruled until 1952.

Muhammad `Ali was the first and also the last of his line to apply a really independent and comprehensive foreign policy. His successors were fully absorbed in their adventures in Africa and in their complicated relations with the Ottoman suzerain and, later, the British occupying power. Their first independent venture in the Middle East was the intervention in Palestine in 1948. The resulting failure led directly to the fall of the dynasty and the emergence of a new regime.

In addition to Egypt, there were other provinces of the Ottoman Empire whose rulers, often of local origin, were able to maintain some measure of autonomy and even to establish commercial, and sometimes also diplomatic, relations with foreign powers. Notable among these is Lebanon. The Republic of Lebanon in its present frontiers is a French creation dating from the early years of the French mandate. Feeling that the original principality of Mount Lebanon, sometimes called the Petit Liban, was too small and too weak to maintain itself, the French mandatary government enlarged its territory by adding a number of northern, eastern, southern, and coastal districts, thus creating the Grand Liban, and including a considerable Muslim population. The Grand Liban was new and, like other states fashioned out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, more than a little artificial. The Petit Liban, in contrast, had been the seat of autonomous Christian or Druze principalities for centuries. Already at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Druze prince Fakhr al-Din Ma`n had created an independent Lebanon and had found a Western ally in the grand duke of Tuscany. After Fakhr al-Din's fall and execution, the Shihab princes of Lebanon managed to retain a large measure of autonomy. The Lebanese Maronites, by now the dominant community on the mountain, formed a relationship with France and with French and Italian religious orders that continued until modern times. During the communal disturbances of the nineteenth and the political rivalries of the twentieth century, some of the Maronite hierarchy and leaders developed the habit of looking to the West, and particularly to France, for support and protection. The tradition grew up of the Catholic bastion of Mount Lebanon-the brave and loyal support of Christian and Western civilization amid the hordes of Asia and Islam. During the period of the French mandate, the French government relied heavily on this little Catholic Ulster in the Islamic East. Although many Lebanese-especially among the Sunni Muslim population of the Grand Liban-preferred the rival ideologies of Arab nationalism, many others, especially but not exclusively among the Maronites, accepted the role allotted to them and leaned heavily in their policies on the French alliance.