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Map of middle east before ww112/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. This early polling exercise captured a wide range of views-some overlapping, some irreconcilable. The commissioners traveled from city to city accepting petitions and taking testimony, compiling a rare record of Arab popular opinion from the period. 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.ĭisagreement among the region’s residents about their own future certainly helped the commission reach this conclusion. 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. 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.”īut the commissioners also realized that simply lumping diverse ethnic or religious groups together in larger states could lead to bloody results. Indeed, the report insisted on forcing people to live together through complicated legal arrangements that prefigure more recent proposals.Īmong other things, the authors concluded that dividing Iraq into ethnic enclaves was too absurd to merit discussion. 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. Nor do the members of each group necessarily share a vision of how they wish to be governed. But as the King-Crane Commission discovered back in 1919, ethnic and religious groups almost never divide themselves into discrete units. Today, many argue that a century of untold violence and instability-culminating in ISIS’s brutal attempt to erase Middle Eastern borders-might have been avoided if only each of the region’s peoples had achieved independence after World War I. The French-administered region would later become Lebanon and Syria, and the British region would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq. 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. Needless to say, the proposals were disregarded. Interactive map: How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East (Karl Sturm and Nick Danforth)Īfter 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.
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