Accommodating “Syrien im Krieg”

The current geo-political order in the Middle East, the fragility of the political institutions of the states, and the paltry status of international borders in the region that was once known as the Fertile Crescent must emphatically be regarded as a postcolonial scenario, and a post-imperial one at that. The artificial international borders that separate communities and simultaneously force others—groupings of considerable cultural and religious diversity—into unloved shared statehood were to a large extent imposed by the victorious powers upon the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Sèvres, one of the Banlieue treatises that created the new world order after the end of World War I (cf. Gencer 2006, 2).¹ With respect to the Middle Eastern scenario, World War I itself can be regarded as an eruption of conflicts between multiple forces from inside and outside the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over much of the area in question. These conflicts and constellations can well be located in the context of a colonialism that manifested itself in the form of imperialist competition for dominance over the world’s territory outside the Great Powers’ own mainland and their attempt to manage in reality and accommodate in discourse the frictions that the diversity of cultures in the desired regions posed. If this analysis is accepted, then it is incumbent on practitioners of postcolonial studies to examine the pre-history of the current region through the lens of their discipline.² This, after all, was the Orient that Orientalism proclaimed, the region par excellence of Orientalist interaction, desire, and meaning-making. And the era in question, the years immediately prior to and leading into World War I, is, after all, the time when colonialism, and its political extension imperialism, manifested themselves in the most strident way.