Isegoria

The Greater Middle East extends across one thousand miles, west to east, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), from the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains of Iran:

From north to south, if we start at the Black Sea and end on the shores of the Arabian Sea off Oman, it is two thousand miles long. The region includes vast deserts, oases, snow-covered mountains, long rivers, great cities, and coastal plains. And it has a great deal of natural wealth in the form that every industrialized and industrializing country around the world needs—oil and gas.

It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” (Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, including the Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature that not only the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that, until European colonization, most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders.

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was ruled from Istanbul. At its height, it stretched from the gates of Vienna, across Anatolia, and down through Arabia to the Indian Ocean. From west to east it took in what are now Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel/ Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and parts of Iran. It had never bothered to make up names for most of these regions; in 1867 it simply divided them into administrative areas known as Vilayets, which were usually based on where certain tribes lived, be they the Kurds in present-day northern Iraq, or the tribal federations in what is now part of Syria and part of Iraq.

When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916, the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a grease pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the northeast. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south of it under British hegemony.

The term Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century, which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explains the unrest and extremism of today. This explanation can be overstated, though: there was violence and extremism before the Europeans arrived.

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The legacy of European colonialism left the Arabs grouped into nation states and ruled by leaders who tended to favor whichever branch of Islam (and tribe) from which they themselves came. These dictators then used the machinery of state to ensure their writ ruled over the entire area within the artificial lines drawn by the Europeans, regardless of whether this was historically appropriate and fair to the different tribes and religions that had been thrown together.

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As rulers of the Ottoman Empire the Turks saw a rugged, mountainous area dominated by Kurds, then, as the mountains fell away into the flatlands leading toward Baghdad and west to what is now Syria, they saw a place where the majority of people were Sunni Arabs. Finally, after the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates merged and ran down to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the marshlands, and the city of Basra, they saw more Arabs, most of whom were Shia. They ruled this space accordingly, dividing it into three administrative regions: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.

In antiquity, the regions very roughly corresponding to the above were known as Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumer. When the Persians controlled the space they divided it in a similar way, as did Alexander the Great, and later the Umayyad dynasty.

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Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families. Syria’s Kurds are trying to create a statelet they call Rojava. They see it as part of a future, greater Kurdistan, but in the event of its creation, questions would arise as to who would have how much power, and where. If Kurdistan does become an internationally recognized state, then the shape of Iraq will change.

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Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular that London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately, both were promised the same thing—control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saudi and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted off the maps, drew some lines, and said the head of the Saudi family could rule over one region and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would “need” a British diplomat to keep an eye on things. The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia—the rough equivalent would be calling the UK “Windsorland.”

The British, sticklers for administration, named the other area Transjordan, which was shorthand for “the other side of the Jordan River.” A dusty little town called Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan. But the Hashemites were not from the Amman area: they were originally part of the powerful Qureshi tribe from the Mecca region, and the original inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. The majority of the population is now Palestinian: when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, many Palestinians fled to Jordan, which was the only Arab state to grant them citizenship. We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 6.5 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.

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Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.

The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birthrate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighboring Israel/ Palestine. There has been only one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.

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Some parts of the capital, Beirut, are exclusively Shia Muslim, as is most of the south of the country. This is where the Shia Hezbollah group (backed by Shia-dominated Iran) is dominant. Another Shia stronghold is the Bekaa Valley, which Hezbollah has used as a staging post for its forages into Syria to support government forces there. Other towns are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. For example, Tripoli, in the north, is thought to be 80 percent Sunni, but it also has a sizable Alawite minority, and given the Sunni-Alawite tensions next door in Syria, this has led to sporadic bouts of fighting.

Lebanon appears to be a unified state only from the perspective of seeing it on a map.

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When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time, the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility toward them that they rebranded themselves as Alawites, as in “followers of Ali” to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society. The French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where, over the years, they established themselves as a major power in the land.

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The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, which comprises approximately 12 percent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970. In 1982, Hafez crushed a Muslim Brotherhood Sunni uprising in Hama, killing perhaps thirty thousand people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled.

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It is doubtful that whoever eventually “wins” would look kindly upon a Kurdish statelet within what are nominally the borders of Syria. Not only would the Syrian Sunni majority oppose losing territory, but the Turks would be horrified at having a Syrian Kurdish state on its borders. There would inevitably be moves to join it up to some of the Kurdish-dominated regions inside Turkey itself.

South Africa’s economy is ranked second-largest on the continent, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), behind Nigeria:

It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military, and population (53 million).

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Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into highland, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much farther and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity that grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.

For most of southern Africa, doing business with the outside world means doing business with Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town. South Africa has used its natural wealth and location to tie its neighbors into its transport system, meaning there is a two-way rail and road conveyor belt stretching from the ports in East London, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban; stretching north through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania; reaching even into Katanga Province of the DRC and eastward into Mozambique. The new Chinese-built railway from Katanga to the Angolan coast has been laid to challenge this dominance and might take some traffic from the DRC, but South Africa looks destined to maintain its advantages.

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In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.

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Nevertheless, every year more roads and railroads are being built connecting this incredibly diverse space. The vast distances of the oceans and deserts separating Africa from everywhere have been overcome by air travel, and industrial muscle has created harbors in places nature had not intended them to be.

In every decade since the 1960s, optimists have written about how Africa is on the brink of prevailing over the hand that history and nature have dealt it. Perhaps this time it is true. It needs to be. By some estimates, Sub-Saharan Africa currently holds 1.1 billion people—by 2050 that may just more than double, to 2.4 billion.

While Metternich would go on to be an implacable foe, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), his initial impression of Napoleon was largely positive:

What at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the image of language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him. He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.

The Chinese are everywhere, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and they mean business:

About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which—along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries—means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on much larger projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $ 14 billion railroad project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 percent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the Eastern Seaboard.

Over the southern border, Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects.

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China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $ 8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $ 2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.

In Luanda, the CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment buildings built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.

What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products.

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Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.

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South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer, Angola, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders:

It is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by jungle to the north, and by desert to the south, while the eastern regions are sparsely populated, rugged land that acts as a buffer zone with the DRC and Zambia.

The majority of the 22 million–strong population live in the western half, which is well watered and can sustain agriculture; and off the coast in the west lie most of Angola’s oil fields. The rigs out in the Atlantic are owned mostly by American companies, but more than half of the output ends up in China. This makes Angola (dependent on the ebb and flow of sales) second only to Saudi Arabia as the biggest supplier of crude oil to the Middle Kingdom.

Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the “socialists,” the United States and apartheid South Africa backed the “rebels.” Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. Their political disguise was as the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles, while its opponents would become anti-Communist.

The Mbundu had the geographical but not the numerical advantage. They held the capital, Luanda; had access to the oil fields and the main river, the Cuanza; and were backed by countries that could supply them with Russian arms and Cuban soldiers. They prevailed in 2002, and their top echelons immediately undermined their own somewhat questionable socialist credentials by joining the long list of colonial and African leaders who enriched themselves at the expense of the people.

Napoleon had an ambivalent relationship, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), with the Jewish population:

On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed’ and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce ‘the shameful expedient’ of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course).

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This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.

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He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).

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He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns.

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Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.

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The Jewish elders answered the questions he posed brilliantly, pointing out that exogamous marriage was as unpopular with Jews as it was with Christians, that interest rates reflected the risks of non-repayment, and that French Jews were patriotic supporters of his Empire.

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Napoleon thereafter proclaimed Judaism one of France’s three official religions, saying ‘I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.’

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‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’

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On March 17, 1808 he passed ‘The Infamous Decree’ which imposed further restrictions on the Jews, making debts harder to collect, conscription harder to avoid and the purchase of new trading licences compulsory.

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In Germany Jews became full citizens under Napoleon’s edict forming Westphalia in 1807, with special taxes on them abolished. Similarly, in 1811 the five hundred Jewish families of the Frankfurt ghetto were made full citizens, as were all Jews except moneylenders in Baden. In Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen the entry of Napoleon’s troops brought civil rights for the Jews, however much the local rulers and populace hated it.

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There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France,

By size, population, and natural resources, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country:

It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 177 million people, which, with its size and natural resources, makes it the leading regional power. It is formed from the territories of several ancient kingdoms that the British brought together as an administrative area. In 1898, they drew up a “British Protectorate on the River Niger” that in turn became Nigeria.

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In colonial times the British preferred to stay in the southwestern area along the coast. Their “civilizing” mission rarely extended to the highlands of the center, nor up to the Muslim populations in the north, and this half of the country remains less developed than the south. Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system.

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The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business. The offshore oil fields are mostly free of this activity and that is where the investment is heading.

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north.

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Most of the villages they have captured are on the Mandara mountain range, which backs onto Cameroon. This means the national army is operating a long way from its bases and cannot surround a Boko Haram force. Cameroon’s government does not welcome Boko Haram, but the countryside gives the fighters space to retreat to if required.