Forget Sykes-Picot.

Its the Treaty of Svres That Explains

the Modern Middle East.
Ninety-five years ago today, Europe carved up the Ottoman empire. That treaty barely lasted a year, but we're feeling its
aftershocks today.
BY NICK DANFORTH

AUGUST 10, 2015

Ninety-five years ago today, European diplomats gathered at a porcelain factory in the Paris suburb of Svres and signed a treaty to remake the
Middle East from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The plan collapsed so quickly we barely remember it anymore, but the short-lived Treaty of
Svres, no less than the endlessly discussed Sykes-Picot agreement, had consequences that can still be seen today. We might do well to consider
a few of them as the anniversary of this forgotten treaty quietly passes by.

In 1915, as British troops prepared to march on Istanbul by way of the Gallipoli peninsula, the government in London printed silk handkerchiefs
heralding the end of the Ottoman empire. It was a bit premature (the battle of Gallipoli turned out to be one of the Ottomans few World War I
victories) but by 1920 Britains confidence seemed justified: With allied troops occupying the Ottoman capital, representatives from the wars
victorious powers signed a treaty with the defeated Ottoman government that divided the empires lands into European spheres of influence.
Svres internationalized Istanbul and the Bosphorus, while giving pieces of Anatolian territory to the Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, French,
British, and Italians. Seeing how and why the first European plan for dividing up the Middle East failed, we can better understand the regions
present-day borders, as well as the contradictions of contemporary Kurdish nationalism and the political challenges facing modern Turkey.
Within a year of signing the Treaty of Svres, European powers began to suspect they had bitten off more than they could chew. Determined to
resist foreign occupation, Ottoman officers like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk reorganized the remnants of the Ottoman army and, after several years
of desperate fighting, drove out the foreign armies seeking to enforce the treatys terms. The result was Turkey as we recognize it today, whose
new borders were officially established in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
Svres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some
scholars have called the Svres syndrome. Svres certainly plays a role in Turkeys sensitivity over Kurdish separatism, as well as the belief
that the Armenian genocide widely used by European diplomats to justify their plans for Anatolia in 1920 was always an anti-Turkish
conspiracy rather than a matter of historical truth. Moreover, Turkeys foundational struggle with colonial occupation left its mark in a
persistent form of anti-imperial nationalism, directed first against Britain, during the Cold War against Russia, and now, quite frequently,
against the United States.
But the legacy of Svres extends well beyond Turkey, which is precisely why we should include this treaty alongside Sykes-Picot in our history
of the Middle East. It will help us challenge the widespread notion that the regions problems all began with Europeans drawing borders on a
blank map.
Theres no doubt that Europeans were happy to create borders that conformed to their own interests whenever they could get away with it. But
the failure of Svres proves that that sometimes they couldnt. When European statesmen tried to redraw the map of Anatolia, their efforts were
forcefully defeated. In the Middle East, by contrast, Europeans succeeded in imposing borders because they had the military power to prevail
over the people resisting them. Had the Syrian nationalist Yusuf al-Azma, another mustachioed Ottoman army officer, replicated Ataturks
military success and defeated the French at the Battle of Maysalun, European plans for the Levant would have gone the way of Svres.

Would different borders have made the Middle East more stable, or perhaps less prone to sectarian violence? Not necessarily. But looking at
history through the lens of the Svres treaty suggests a deeper point about the cause-and-effect relationship between European-drawn borders
and Middle Eastern instability: the regions that ended up with borders imposed by Europe tended to be those already too weak or disorganized
to successfully resist colonial occupation. Turkey didnt become wealthier and more democratic than Syria or Iraq because it had the good
fortune to get the right borders. Rather, the factors that enabled Turkey to defy European plans and draw its own borders including an army
and economic infrastructure inherited from the Ottoman empire were some of the same ones that enabled Turkey to build a strong,
centralized, European-style nation-state.
Of course, plenty of Kurdish nationalists might claim that Turkeys borders actually are wrong. Indeed, some cite Kurdish statelessness as a
fatal flaw in the regions post-Ottoman borders. But when European imperialists tried to create a Kurdish state at Svres, many Kurds fought
alongside Ataturk to upend the treaty. Its a reminder that political loyalties can and do transcend national identities in ways we would do well
to realize today.
The Kurdish state envisioned in the Svres Treaty would, crucially, have been under British control. While this appealed to some Kurdish
nationalists, others found this form of British-dominated independence problematic. So they joined up to fight with the Turkish national
movement. Particularly among religious Kurds, continued Turkish or Ottoman rule seemed preferable to Christian colonization. Other Kurds,
for more practical reasons, worried that once in charge the British would inevitably support recently dispossessed Armenians seeking to return
to the region. Some subsequently regretted their decision when it became clear the state they had fought to create would be significantly more
Turkish and less religious than anticipated. But others, under varying degrees of duress, chose instead to accept the identity the new state
offered them.
Many Turkish nationalists remain frightened by the way their state was destroyed by Svres, while many Kurdish nationalists still imagine the
state they might have achieved. At the same time, todays Turkish government extolls the virtues of Ottoman tolerance and multiculturalism,
while Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, apparently after reading the sociologist Benedict Anderson in prison, claims to have
discovered that all nations are merely social constructs. The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish HDP spent
much of the last decade competing to convince Kurdish voters that a vote for their party was a vote for peace competing, that is, over which
party was capable of resolving Turkeys long-simmering conflict by creating a more stable and inclusive state. In short, as many Americans still
debate the artificial nature of European-made states in the Middle East, Turkey is fitfully transcending a century-long obsession with proving
how real it is.
Needless to say, the renewed violence Turkey has seen in the past several weeks threatens these fragile elements of a post-national consensus.
With the AKP calling for the arrest of Kurdish political leaders and Kurdish guerrillas shooting police officers, nationalists on both sides are
falling back into familiar, irreconcilable positions. For 95 years, Turkey reaped the political and economic benefits of its victory over the Treaty
of Svres. But building on this success now requires forging a more flexible political model, one that helps render battles over borders and
national identity irrelevant.
Photocredit:David Rumsey Map Collection