According to the agreement, postwar Middle East was to be divided among the allies, with France and Britain "prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab state or a conferedation of states … under the suzerainty of an Arab chief." Portions of present-day Turkey, Syria, Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq were to constitute this so-called independent state. In the same year Britain also signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement with France, which called for an independent Arab State or a confederation of states, although it was calculatedly ambiguous on the question of how much of a role each of these powers would play in this "independent" state. In 1916 the British promised independence to Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca and sharif of the Hashemite family, if he would help them against the Ottomans. Some of the earliest attempts to achieve independence, or at least self-determination, occurred in the context of World War I. This force, on the one hand, forged powerful bonds, and on the other hand, made Middle Easterners see themselves as distinctly different from Europeans. Feelings of political identity, economic identity, geographic identity, and religious identity coalesced into a powerful force. ![]() Over time, this resistance coalesced into a sense of nationalism that was completely at odds with the political reality of being colonized, that is, existing only for the betterment of the colonizer. For example, the more the French sought to gain materially from Algeria, the more resistance developed among the Algerians. Throughout the region, the relationship between colony and metropole (the colonizing power) deeply affected the intellectual, ideological, and material development of both. In Iran, different currents of nationalism imagined different futures for the country. Arab nationalism became popular among intellectuals in Greater Syria Turkish nationalism also grew, with its own ideas about how national communities ought to be formed. The organizations' ideological leadership gave direction to these direct challenges to imperial presence. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such groups began to organize nationalist demonstrations some directly challenged the imperial rule of the British, the French, and even the Ottoman Turks. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the ideal of autonomy was disseminated by such organizations as the National Party in Egypt, the Young Ottomans and then the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, secret Arab societies in Beirut and Damascus, and the Young Tunisians. The British, the French, and the Ottomans had varying degrees of control in different parts of the region throughout the region, a strong nationalist sentiment opposed this foreign control. To understand the form the processes of independence and decolonization took in the Middle East, one has to begin in the nineteenth century. According to historian Albert Hourani, "It would be better … to see the history of this period as that of a complex interaction: of the will of ancient and stable societies to reconstitute themselves, preserving what they had of their own while making the necessary changes in order to survive in the modern world increasingly organized on other principles, and where the centers of world power have lain for long, and still lie, outside the Middle East" (Hourani, Khoury, and Wilson 2004, p. Indeed, the independence process has been very complex in the Middle East. Such interests now had the added dimension of being pursued within the larger framework of geopolitical tensions created by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain and the United States focused on controlling the production of oil. While the formal empires of European countries seemingly disintegrated in the 1950s, the former colonial powers, now joined by the United States, continued to maintain a presence in the region. ![]() A series of treaties and agreements led to British withdrawal from Egypt and Iraq as a result of one of these agreements, Sudan also gained independence. The British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, leaving behind the new state of Israel, which was carved out of a large portion of Palestine from most of the rest was created Jordan. ![]() France retreated from Syria and Lebanon in 1946 after numerous catastrophic engagements with local peoples. In the decades immediately following the conclusion of World War II, European formal empires in the Middle East began to unravel. Independence and Decolonization, Middle East
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