WWI-era imperial planners reframed the Middle East’s future around nationality while retaining racial hierarchy

Evidence

Prior to 1914, the British and French governing elites viewed the Ottoman empire as a composite state, and Western Asia as a political unity that belonged to that imperial edifice—la Turquie d’Asie. By 1917, Sykes, in particular, felt the need for a complete scheme that would replace that state: a vision that hung together in tune with the spirit of the time—the principle of nationality. As per much of British intellectual culture in this period, Sykes was captivated by racial nationalist thought. He believed that the nation constituted the historical basis for stable and civilised political organisation. Sykes judged that the war had changed the norms of global politics, away from colonialism and imperialism towards self-­determination. Nationality, he believed, had to be the new basis for a Western Asia without the Ottomans. Sykes did not think that the region was ready for complete national independence; like the majority of his colleagues in Britain and France, he assumed that Western Asia needed European, specifically British and French, supervision due to its stage of racial development. But Sykes was emphatic that the nation had to be the building block for a re-constituted ‘Asiatic Turkey’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 661

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to theories of racial nationalism as administrative ideology in late imperial Britain, and to the Sykes-Picot agreement’s intellectual genealogy.