ABSTRACT
It might at first sight seem that the inclusion of the Middle East in a book entitled Europe and Ethnicity would require some special pleading. But in the period 1914-1923 its future shape was at the disposal of the victorious Allied and Associated Powers. Moreover, the area concerned, that of the Ottoman empire, was very much part of the European ‘system’ during and just after the First World War. Modern Europeans conveniently forget how much of the continent’s history after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was shaped by the Turks and the vigorous Islamic religion and culture they brought with them. Much of the history of central and eastern Europe emerged out of the period after the siege of Vienna in 1683 when the Habsburg armies commanded by their great general, Prince Eugene, began to prise the Turks out of their conquests and restored these areas to Christendom. For much of the nineteenth century Turkey was widely viewed as the ‘sick man of Europe’, but however great the pressure the Turks came under in the Balkans, their hold over their extensive Middle Eastern territories remained firm, not least because Muslims saw the Ottomans as the one remaining buttress of the Faith, but also because the region provided the empire with its food supplies. Hence, in 1914 the Ottoman empire stood with those of the Habsburgs and Romanovs as the three great examples of multinational states which seemingly mocked the strident claim of nationalism to be the ideology of the age. But by 1918 the Turkish empire was in ruins, apparently at the whim of the victorious Allied Powers, its many peoples to be disposed of as the victors thought fit, and it is out of the decisions taken that the ethnic shape of the Middle East emerged. It remained to be seen whether the Allied statesmen would be able to dispose of the Middle East more wisely or successfully than the Ottomans had done over the previous four centuries.
