One hundred years ago in this month of August, German troops raced
through Belgium, wheeled towards France, and nearly overran Paris before the
Western Front settled into the trenches of northern France where the horror of
the world’s first industrialized war would take place over the next four years.
The aftermath of this war still defines our world.
One particular way is the national boundaries that define political rule
by governments. For Europe and the Middle East, these boundaries were
determined by the victorious powers (notably, Britain and France) during the
peace negotiations that followed the suspension of hostilities on November 11,
1918.
The victorious powers dismantled the empires of Austria-Hungary and the
Ottoman dynasty. They reduced the territory of Germany and Russia as they
created independent nations in Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,
Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. They moved territory from one nation to
another, e.g. Transylvania was moved from Hungary to Romania.
The victorious Allied powers did not redraw these maps out of altruistic
motives. They operated out of the Great Powers theory and their desire to
expand their colonial empires. Germany and Russia were whittled down to reduce
their power; Austria-Hungary was dismantled to end its Great Power status. That
left Britain and France as the two major powers to direct the course of
European affairs, or so they thought.
The Ottoman empire was dismantled to further the colonial empires of
Britain and France with a view to gaining control over the oil assets of the
Middle East. By this time, Europe was well aware of the economic importance of
oil and where oil could be found.
Provinces and territories were conglomerated toward this end. Ethnic
groups were united where they should have been left apart. Proof of this is
shown by the merger of Czechs and Slovaks. Once Czechoslovakia escaped the
control of Moscow, the two peoples separated. Yugoslavia went through the same
process, but was unable to do so amicably.
Those dissolutions were the beginning. Much of what we now witness is
the further undoing of these borders that were drawn unwisely. The Ukraine
conflict is another story and will need a separate post. But what we see in
Iraq is the undoing of three Ottoman provinces that were combined into one
colonial territory to place the oil assets under one political rule. Iraq is
separating into its three original provinces, each struggling to exist apart
from the others yet wishing to dominate the rest: the Shiite south aligned with
Iran, the Sunni middle, and the Kurdish north.
In the future, we should expect more unraveling of the redrawn
boundaries. Although western Europe is firmly settled, the rest is in play. We
often think the Second World War is the one that determined the course of our
history, but it is the First World War, better known overseas as the Great War,
that continues to influence the conflicts of our times.
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