Chapter Twelve: The Middle East Under European Control, 1923-1948

When the dust cleared from the final peace settlement in the early 1920s, France and Britain had emerged as the masters of nearly the entire Arab world. Paris directly governed Lebanon and Syria, while London, in keeping with its indirect colonial approach, controlled Egypt and the mandates of Transjordan and Iraq through local rulers. We will look at the situation in Palestine in Chapter 13. However, the imperial powers did not formally rule these territories as permanent colonies. Instead, on the basis of the mandatory agreements into which they had entered, or, in the case of Egypt, the public statements of policy they had made, France and Britain administered those places on a temporary basis. Moreover, at President Woodrow Wilson’s insistence, Paris and London had formally committed themselves to preparing the peoples they ruled in the Middle East for eventual self-government.

As will see, they did not honor that obligation. Instead, seeking to turn their new possessions in the region into permanent, if nominally independent, neo-colonies, the imperial states hindered the emergence of effective governments and eschewed making any real effort to help the Arab states develop the close connection between citizens and government on which genuine legitimacy ultimately rests. Worse, in several cases, they bequeathed to the Arab governments substantial coercive capacities designed to permit those states to maintain order over their populations.

Paris and London possessed the most power and thus had the biggest impact on political developments in those territories, but they were not alone in inhibiting the development of effective governments in the region. Indigenous groups including greedy elites, populist extremist organizations, and, especially, autocratic military officers also pursued policies that interfered with the development of popular, stable governments. Coupled with the self-interested approach of the imperial powers, the actions of these groups ensured that Egypt and the Arab mandates emerged from World War II not as secure, self-governing countries, but instead as unstable and undemocratic states that were simultaneously powerful due to their possession of substantial coercive capacities, and weak, owing to their lack of legitimacy and absence of close connections with the people they ruled.

Iraq: Quasi Independence

Iraq’s experience between the end of the First World War and the conclusion of World War II was emblematic of this story. On the surface, the country appeared to be an interwar success. As the mandatory power, Britain had provided it with modern political institutions and had even granted it its independence in 1932. A charter member of the United Nations, Iraq seemed to have become a stable member of the international order by the end of the Second World War.

In fact, Iraq emerged from that conflict a deeply troubled country. That it did so was largely a function of London’s self-interested administration. During its time as the mandatory power, Britain had imposed a variety of political, economic, military, and social policies on Iraq that were designed to serve its imperial interests rather than the needs of the Iraqi people. Collectively, they ensured that this multi-ethnic, multi- confessional country failed to develop the strong civic-political culture, meaning a sense of identity with the state and an acceptance of its legitimate power, that modern polities need to function effectively. The British certainly bore primary responsibility for Iraq’s warped development, but they were not solely culpable for its failure to cultivate a robust civic-political culture. Drawing on the values they had acquired in Ottoman military academies, the Sunni elite that dominated Iraq in the 1930s also contributed to the country’s fractured political development by promoting an authoritarian and militarized conception of the state, and by affording the numerically larger Kurdish and Shiʿa Arabs with little power or even sense of belonging in the national community.

Mandatory Iraq, 1922-1932

The peculiar contours of the Iraqi state first took shape under indirect imperial rule during the mandatory period. They emerged as a result of Britain’s pursuit of two broad objectives for the country. First, it acted to prepare Iraq for self-government as required by the League of Nations’ mandate. Second, and far more important, it also sought to ensure that Iraq would remain an informal British colony after it had secured its independence. That these two goals were clearly in conflict was not obvious to British officials at the time. On the contrary, they perceived them to be complementary in nature.

On the surface, Britain achieved a great deal for the country during its brief tenure as the mandatory power. Drawing on its long history of representative government, it helped nurture the key institutions needed for Iraq to function as a democratic state. Under Britain’s tutelage, Iraq acquired a constitution, an elected parliament, a military, a constitutional monarch in the form of the Hashemite leader of the Arab Revolt, Faisal I (r. 1921-1933), and the working parts of an administrative state. Britain also helped to ensure the development of Iraq’s economy by persuading the League of Nations to assign the disputed vilayet of Mosul and its substantial oil reserves to Iraq instead of Türkiye in 1925, and it established a new way of assuring internal stability through the use of cost-effective air power rather than through the maintenance of an expensive conscription army.

British officials also made sweeping changes to the political, legal, and economic structure of rural Iraq intended to secure the interests of its tribal people. In doing so, they drew on the extensive historical and anthropological knowledge they had acquired managing a huge, globe-spanning empire. Noting the similarity between rural Iraqis and the reputedly fierce-but-honorable Pathan people of the northwest frontier region of Britain’s India colony, British officials devised a romantic construction of the Iraqi tribespeople that held that, like their Pathan counterparts, the people of rural Iraq were “noble savages” who were uncorrupted by civilization. In the eyes of the British, this was a mixed blessing for the rural Iraqis. That is, while their closeness to nature left them admirably honest and innately good, it also rendered them too naive and credulous to avoid being exploited by the town Arabs whom racist colonial officers perceived as being wily and cynical. This situation deeply troubled British officials. How, they asked themselves, could they safeguard the noble-but-simple tribespeople from their unscrupulous, urban neighbors?

While anthropological knowledge of the subcontinent raised the need to protect the tribespeople, familiarity with their own history led the British to a solution to this problem. Looking back on the role that the rural gentry had played in guarding peasants from an absolutist government under the Tudor monarchs, they reasoned that a comparable class of landlords could shield the mandate’s benighted tribal people by similarly interceding between them and the state. Fortunately for the British, rural Iraq seemed to have an existing class of leaders that they believed could, if properly strengthened, satisfy that need: the shaykhs who served as tribal leaders. Accordingly, the mandatory government gave them the tools needed to serve as a mediating force. It granted the shaykhs judicial power over the people of their tribes, made them responsible for tax collection and the maintenance of order, and, most critically, assigned them legal title to land that the tribes had heretofore held on a communal basis.

Independence, 1932

Iraqi independence came quickly. Committed to a balanced budget, Britain was eager to shed itself of expenses, even the comparatively minimal costs it incurred as the mandatory power in Iraq. Accordingly, London opened talks with Faisal I’s government in 1929 aimed at establishing Iraq as an independent state while simultaneously ensuring Britain’s interests. Signed in 1932, the resulting accord seemed beneficial for both parties. By its terms, Iraq gained its independence and assumed a seat at the League of Nations; in exchange, Britain secured control of strategic airbases at Habbaniya near Baghdad and at Shuaiba in the south, as well as the right to move troops through Iraq during time of war. It also won the exclusive right to supply Iraq with military advisors and equipment. The terms of the treaty were to last for twenty-five years.

With the signing of the agreement, Britain appeared to have brought the mandate to a successful conclusion for all parties. Baghdad had won its independence, the first of the mandates to do so, and seemed to possess the institutional infrastructure needed to function as a sovereign state. Meanwhile, for its part London had secured its key strategic goals in Iraq for at least the next few decades.

Problems

However, reality most certainly did not match appearances. Britain had structured Iraq based on a set of assumptions and preconceived notions that proved wildly inaccurate, and it had imposed policies that worked to ensure its short-term interests at the expense of Iraq’s long-term needs. The result was the emergence of a deeply flawed and troubled country with a society riven by exploitation and inequality, a state that was little more than a façade behind which self-interested elite factions struggled over the division of the spoils, and a dominant Sunni, pan-Arabist political ideology that afforded little place for the country’s millions of Kurds and Shiʿa. These outcomes were the product of a number of internal and external forces. However, four British actions during the mandatory period proved particularly important in producing them: its handling of the negotiations over Mosul, its reliance on airpower to ensure order, its elevation of the tribal shaykhs to a position of authority, and its insistence on an independence treaty that left Iraq in a state of neocolonial dependence.

The disposition of Mosul reflected most clearly how London pursued its interests at the expense of Baghdad, and how, in the process, it weakened and delegitimized the Iraqi state. Britain had administered the former Ottoman vilayet of Mosul through the Iraq mandate since the end of World War I. As we saw in Chapter Ten, however, it had agreed at Turkish insistence to defer the issue of its final disposition to the League of Nations. Thus, whether oil-rich Mosul would, or would not, be part of Iraq remained very much an open question during the mid 1920s.

In the meantime, an important event was taking place in the oil industry that would, to the detriment of Iraq, intersect with the question of Mosul’s disposition. In a complex series of negotiations, a consortium of oil companies had assumed control of the German and Ottoman shares of the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC), renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in 1929, and had thus acquired the exclusive right to find and exploit oil in the territory of the former Ottoman Empire. The consortium was an international one, consisting of the French Compagnie Française des Pétroles, Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company, British-controlled Royal Dutch Shell, and a group of five American firms headed by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Each party received a 23.75 percent share of the TPC, with the remainder going to the Armenian businessperson Calouste “Mr. Five Percent” Gulbenkian (1889-1955), who had put the original TPC consortium together in 1912. Critically, the constituent companies in the TPC agreed to adhere to a self-denial clause known as the Red Line Agreement that bound them to pursue concessions in the territory of the former Ottoman Empire on a joint basis through the TPC. Applying to Iraq, this provision had the effect of limiting competition for the right to exploit oil in Mosul and thus helped to depress the price of the concession that the TPC negotiated with Baghdad in 1925.

Still, the consortium faced the undesirable prospect of having to share a substantial portion of the profits on any oil found in Mosul with the Iraqi government. This situation stemmed from an agreement negotiated in 1920 that had allocated to Baghdad not merely a portion of the profits but also a 20 percent ownership share of any oil produced in Iraq by the TPC. London had accepted that arrangement in the early 1920s, but it had, for two reasons, become unalterably opposed to it by mid- decade. First, an ownership position would result in Baghdad receiving a substantially larger share of the profits than was the case in similar states. Second, and more importantly, an ownership stake would give Iraq a voice in setting production rates and prices and would thus establish a dangerous precedent that other producing countries might seek to follow.

However, as British officials were well aware, they possessed a powerful card that they could, and did, play to block Baghdad from participating in the management of the concession. It involved the negotiations with Türkiye. Exploiting its role as the mandatory power, London threatened to inform the League of Nations that it was willing to cede the vilayet of Mosul to Türkiye if the Iraqi government did not abandon its ownership stake. This move was heavy handed and imperialistic, but it was also effective. Unwilling to risk the loss of Mosul and its oil, Faisal I reluctantly agreed to relinquish Iraq’s 20 percent ownership position in the TPC in favor of a modest increase in royalty payments and a British promise to work aggressively to keep the vilayet in Iraq.

Britain’s hardball approach to Mosul adversely affected Iraq’s political and economic development in two critical ways. First, it resulted in the country receiving a substantially smaller share of the TPC’s profits following the discovery of oil near Kirkuk in 1927 than it would have received had it retained its ownership position. As a result, interwar Iraq was perpetually starved of the funds needed to promote economic development. Second, Britain’s ability to compel Faisal I’s government to yield its ownership position made abundantly clear the degree to which the monarchy was subordinate to London and thus undermined the credibility of the Iraqi state in the eyes of its people.

Britain’s strategy of using airplanes to enforce internal order similarly warped Iraq and delegitimized its state. As we saw in Chapter Ten, the use of aircraft in the mandate had its roots in the financial constraints that London faced in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Determined to return to a balanced budget, the British government had sought at that time to aggressively trim the cost of its empire, including the expenses it incurred in Iraq. However, effecting a significant reduction in the cost of the Iraq mandate seemed nearly impossible. Not only was it a large country and thus expensive to police, but it had already been the scene of a major rebellion that had required an expensive deployment of troops to bring under control. Indeed, Iraq had become so costly that some officials had given serious thought to abandoning it altogether.

As we also saw in Chapter Ten, Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was not among them. Determined to keep the mandate, he and his advisors had decided in 1921 that Britain could retain control of it at an acceptable cost through the use of airplanes. Inexpensive yet powerful, aircraft and the threat of bombing would both ensure order and compel the heretofore autonomous rural tribes to pay the taxes that the mandatory government imposed. Their use would thus make Britain’s presence in Iraq financially self-sustaining.

The approach worked. Indeed, from London’s perspective, the employment of airpower to coerce rural Iraqis appeared to be one of the great successes of its Middle East policy in the early 1920s. It not only compelled obedience from the tribespeople, just as Churchill had argued that it would, but it also all-but eliminated the cost of maintaining order in the mandate. As a result, Britain was able to retain possession of Iraq in a way that was consistent with its commitment to a balanced budget.

The reliance on air power may have served Britain’s financial interests, but it ran diametrically counter to Baghdad’s political goals. Intent on nation building Faisal I’s government had been pushing for the development of a large conscription-based army that would bring multiple benefits. First, such a force would provide the state with the means both to defend itself from external attack and to maintain internal order. Equally important, it would also help to inculcate in the Iraqi people a shared sense of identity with the Hashemite monarchy and the state, thereby helping to tie Faisal I’s heterogenous country together into a coherent whole. It was a sound, if expensive, proposal. As such, it was incompatible with Britain’s desire to control costs. Accordingly, London rejected it outright and instead continued to depend on airpower for security through the early 1930s.

This decision had profound implications. The absence of a conscription army meant that the Iraqi state lacked an important institution for forging a nation out of its divergent ethnic and confessional groups, one that could have helped it to develop the imagined political community that is so essential to a shared sense of identity. Meanwhile, the use of airplanes to enforce internal order and compel the payment of taxes meant that the state’s connection with its subjects rested, at root, on violence and intimidation rather than on positive interactions that might bind the people to the government and help to create a positive civic-political culture. In other words, Britain’s decision about the nature of the Iraqi military meant that Faisal I’s government would hold substantial coercive capacities but would lack the positive connections with the people on which genuine legitimacy ultimately rests. This reliance on despotic state power at the expense of a broad popular mandate would cast long shadows. Thereafter, nearly all subsequent Iraqi governments eschewed any meaningful effort to win the consent of the governed and instead ruled by means of brute force.

Meanwhile, the effort to protect the rural tribespeople from the presumably rapacious town Arabs also created lasting issues that undermined Iraq’s political development. The problem here stemmed from the fact that the historical and anthropological analogies that British officials had drawn on in approaching the mandate were almost comically off the mark and had led them to implement policies that radically, and detrimentally, reshaped the structure of Iraqi society. The shaykhs were not, as the British had assumed, powerful, charismatic figures who represented the will of the tribes. Rather, they were first-among-equals whose authority rarely extended beyond the power of persuasion. London’s decision to vest judicial power in these men and, more importantly, to grant them title to tribal land thus did not reinforce existing practices. Instead it imposed a top-down social revolution on rural Iraq that turned these weak figures of tenuous influence into a powerful class of landlords whose authority ultimately rested on the coercive power of the state. The consequences were substantial. In short order, rural Iraqis fell into thrall to the landlord-shaykhs and their financial backers, the town Arabs, the very class, ironically, from whom the British had sought to protect the tribespeople. The passage of the Law Governing the Rights and Duties of Cultivators in 1933 confirmed these momentous changes. Imposing draconian restrictions on the ability of indebted peasants to move and binding them to the land, this sweeping law allowed the shaykhs to complete the enserfment of the heretofore free tribespeople that British policy had inadvertently started.

Unsurprisingly, the attempt by London to restructure Iraqi society based on flawed historical and anthropological assumptions adversely affected the mandate’s development in two ways. First, it warped the country’s already unstable political system. The transformation of the shaykhs into a politically and economically powerful class helped fuel the emergence of an oligarchic system of government in which competing factions composed of well-connected political figures, newly empowered landlord-shaykhs, and affluent town Arabs competed for access to the levers of power on which the acquisition of new wealth depended. Thanks to British actions Iraq ended up with a government of and for the elite rather than one attuned to the needs of ordinary Iraqis. Second, Britain’s efforts to restructure Iraqi society dramatically widened economic inequality in the country and helped to create deep-seated feelings of bitterness and resentment, particularly among the tribespeople who increasingly fled the shaykhs’ exploitation by moving to the shantytowns then popping up on the outskirts of the country’s cities.

Much like the social revolution that Britain had inadvertently affected among the tribespeople, so the treaty that established Iraq as an independent state would create broad resentment in key groups that would come to undermine the state’s legitimacy. The agreement was not without its supporters. Some, including Faisal I, a court faction headed by the important politician Nuri Said (1888-1958), and many of the landlord-shaykhs, continued to perceive value in the connection with Britain and thus saw the treaty as a beneficial one for their country. In contrast, many other politically conscious Iraqis viewed it as an embarrassingly unequal agreement that rendered their country little more than an informal British colony. Educated Sunnis, especially those in the armed forces, were particularly furious about it and the privileges it accorded to Britain. They bitterly resented London’s continued role advising the government and armed forces, railed about its dominance of Iraq’s economy, loudly complained about its retention of airbases, and fiercely assailed its right to move troops through the country during time of war. Unsurprisingly, there emerged among them a stridently nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiment and a deep skepticism about a government that they perceived to be a collaborationist one.

Thus, thanks to a mix of ignorance and self-interest, London’s brief tenure as the mandatory power left a destructive legacy for Iraq. It is true that British officials had provided the country with the critical institutions needed to function as a modern state and that they moved quickly to grant Iraq its independence. However, those positive steps need to be balanced against the fact that Britain’s pursuit of self-interested policies had saddled Iraq with an exploitive elite and an oppressive state that lacked positive connections to the people. The result was a country hobbled by tremendous inequality, class conflict, seething resentment toward the British, widespread alienation toward a political system that relied on its coercive powers to compel obedience, and the absence of a shared sense of national identity. These conditionswere hardly conducive to stable political development.

The Army in Politics

The British continued to exert a great deal of influence over Iraq following its independence, but they no longer enjoyed mastery over the country as they had before 1932. Instead, with the tacit support of the youthful new king, Ghazi (r. 1933-1939), the Sunni-dominated officer corps quickly displaced both London and the civilian factions as the primary force in Iraqi politics. The army’s political ascendency ultimately proved to be short-lived, but its enthusiastic embrace of authoritarianism and its aggressive promotion of a Sunni-dominated, secular, Arab-nationalist state would adversely shape Iraq through the end of the twentieth century.

The Sunni Arab officers and bureaucrats who dominated Iraq in the 1930s held a common vision for their country’s future rooted in their shared Ottoman background. Educated in the military academies of the late empire, these veterans of the Committee for Union and Progress’s (CUP) autocratic regime had little use for liberal, British- supported political concepts like representative government or civil rights, particularly if those practices enfranchised Kurds and Shiʿa Arabs. Instead they hoped to modernize Iraq along authoritarian and militarized lines. Accordingly, once they had assumed a dominant political position, they instituted a stridently pan-Arab nationalist curriculum in the schools, promoted centralization, dismissed democracy as a distraction that would weaken the state, and established a conscription-based military. While they rejected Britain’s liberal political ideas, however, they enthusiastically embraced the coercive powers that London had given the Iraqi state and freely used them to enforce both the central government’s authority and Sunni social and political dominance. Thus, the Iraqi military brutally suppressed Kurdish and Assyrian Christian insurgencies in the mid-1930s and made liberal use of aerial bombing to bring revolting Shiʿa tribes to heel.

Emboldened by its success suppressing these uprisings, the military dramatically intensified its involvement in politics in the mid-1930s. This process started in 1936, when General Bakr Sidqi (1890-1937), a Kurd, used the army to support a coup that made the reformer Hikmat Sulayman (1889-1964) prime minister and installed members of a radical faction called the Ahali group in the cabinet. Seeking to dramatically restructure the country, Sulayman’s government immediately pressed for a series of sweeping changes that were designed to end Iraq’s severe economic and political inequality, such as the legalization of unions and the repeal of the Law Governing the Rights and Duties of Cultivators. These proposals went nowhere thanks to the opposition of the more conservative Sidqi. However, the general did enthusiastically throw his support behind Sulayman’s promotion of a new, broader construction of Iraqi nationalism that was inclusive of Shiʿa and Kurds as well as the prime minister’s “Iraq first” foreign policy that downplayed pan-Arabism in favor of closer ties to Türkiye and Iran.

Those last initiatives proved to be the regime’s downfall. Angry that Sidqi had abandoned pan-Arabism in favor of a more inclusive conception of national identity, a group of Sunni army officers assassinated the general in 1937. Thereafter, the increasingly emboldened officer corps made regular use of violence and coups, six occurred between 1936 and 1941, to compel successive civilian cabinets to adhere to their authoritarian, Sunni, pan-Arabist vision for Iraq.

The Coup of 1941

Regional and global events soon put the Sunni officers and the British on a collision course. Opposition to London’s continued dominance had surged to new heights among Sunni nationalists in the late 1930s in response to Britain’s violent suppression of an Arab uprising in Palestine and its subsequent proposal to partition that territory into Jewish and Palestinian states. Keenly aware of the vast power imbalance that existed between Baghdad and London, however, the officers understood that any effort to try to force the British out would be a fool’s errand. Thus, though they fumed, they made no meaningful attempt to challenge London’s position in Iraq during the late 1930s. However, Germany’s spectacular success during the early stages of World War II appeared to change the political calculus. Not only did the Third Reich’s victories seem to indicate that London’s power was in eclipse, but they also suggested that the nationalists could secure help from Berlin in their efforts to expel Britain. In response, a clique of officers known as the Golden Square began to lay plans for a move against London’s position in Iraq.

Even as the outbreak of the war seemed to create opportunities for the Sunni nationalists, however, it also powerfully reinforced Britain’s determination to retain a dominant position in Iraq. Indeed, the global nature of the war had dramatically heightened the country’s importance in London’s strategic calculations. Not only did Iraqi oil fuel Britain’s critically important Mediterranean fleet, but its territory also served as a vital waystation for the transfer of troops from South Asia to the Middle East and Europe. As such, London was deeply concerned about the threat that the Sunni officers posed to its position in a territory it deemed vital to the war effort.

To the relief of the British, a leadership change in Iraq shortly before the outbreak of World War II not only eased those fears but also seemed to create an opportunity to curb the growing power of the Sunni nationalists. The shift was a product of Ghazi’s untimely death in a car accident in 1939 and the subsequent accession of his son, Faisal II (r. 1939-1958) to the throne. Still an infant, the new king could not yet rule. Accordingly, real power ending up in the hands of the regent, his uncle, Abd al-Ilah (1913-1958). Staunchly pro-British, Abd al-Ilah made clear from the start that he intended to use his considerable constitutional authority, which included the power to approve new prime ministers, to check the pan-Arabists.

Bolstered by Abd al-Ilah’s presence, the British moved to achieve a favorable resolution of the political situation in the spring of 1941. Aware that the Golden Square was conspiring with Germany to push it out of Iraq, London pressed both the regent and Prime Minister Taha al-Hashimi (r. 1941) to adopt a more openly pro-British foreign policy. Al-Hashimi was amenable but was aware that he would need to first weaken the Golden Square if he hoped to align Baghdad more closely with London. Accordingly, he quietly began to reassign its leaders to less-important commands located far from the capital and to replace them with more reliable men. Though well laid out, the plan backfired badly. Catching wind of his scheme before al-Hashimi could put it into effect, the officers quickly organized a countermove aimed at overthrowing the prime minister and at replacing him with the pro-German politician Rashid Ali (r. 1941).

The operation was an almost total success. It removed al-Hashimi from office and secured the Golden Square’s complete control of the government. Critically, however, thanks to the intervention of American ambassador Paul Knabenshue (1883- 1942), the plotters failed to arrest Abd al-Ilah, who slipped out of the palace by hiding under a blanket in the backseat of the ambassador’s official car. As a result, Ali and the Golden Square were unable to force the regent to issue a royal decree legitimating the change in government. Still, this issue aside, the pan-Arabists were pleased with their work. Solidly in control of the country and anticipating German military assistance, they were confident that they would soon be in a position to eject the British from Iraq.

The Anglo-Iraqi War

Coming at a time when German forces were mounting offensives in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, the coup deeply troubled British officials and impelled them to ascertain whether the Iraqi government intended to abide by the terms of the 1932 treaty. They moved to do so in the spring of 1941 by landing Indian troops in Basra, thereby compelling the Iraqi government either to back down or to openly break with Britain. Furious, the Golden Square rose to the bait. Emboldened by the prospect of German support, it countered London’s provocative action by ordering Iraqi troops to surround the British airfield at Habbaniya in late April and by threatening to shoot down any planes that attempted to take off from the base. Having maneuvered the pan- Arabists into formally violating the terms of the 1932 treaty, London followed by ordering British forces defending Habbaniya to first push Iraqi soldiers away from the base and to then advance on Baghdad. Despite the deployment of German aircraft to northern Iraq, the initial British move was successful, as was a second attack on Iraqi positions outside Fallujah shortly thereafter. At that point, the Golden Square’s position gave way. With morale collapsing, the troops defending the capital abandoned their posts en masse, leaving Rashid Ali and the leaders of the Golden Square with little recourse but to flee for safety to Iran. Thus, by the beginning of June, Britain had not only ended the threat to its position in Iraq but had once again taken complete control of the country.

The officers may have gone down to defeat in their showdown with Britain, but their brief time in power nonetheless had an enormous impact on Iraq’s emerging political culture. During their period of dominance in the 1930s and early 1940s, they had institutionalized the vision of authoritarian nationalism that they had acquired during their time studying in the Ottoman Empire’s military academies. Just as important, they had also succeeded in ensuring that both their conception of Iraq as a country dominated by Sunni Arabs and their embrace of pan-Arabism continued to command broad acceptance in the Iraqi government and especially in the military. The impact of these views was as baleful as it was lasting for Iraq. Coming on the heels of Britain’s failure to foster either a strong, inclusive sense of national identity or a government that enjoyed broad legitimacy, the growing prevalence of the officers’ pan-Arabist beliefs prevented the state from constructing a notion of identity that was inclusive of all Iraqis or from establishing a governing system that enjoyed the genuine consent of the people.

The Second British Occupation

Lasting from 1941 to 1947, Britain’s second occupation gave the civilian political elite a chance both to purge Iraq of the officers’ influence and to finally establish a strong connection between government and society. Initially, the pro-British politicians who dominated wartime Iraq appeared to take steps to achieve those ends. They vigorously persecuted the leaders of the coup in 1941 and aggressively purged pan- Arab extremists from the government. They also broadened support for the state by bringing a number of prominent Kurds and Shiʿa into the ruling circle.

Ultimately, however, Nuri Said, Abd al-Ilah, and the other political figures who dominated Iraq during the second occupation did not take advantage of the opportunities that wartime exigencies had presented them. They failed to build strong connections between citizens and state, refused to give Iraqis genuine representation, and made only halfhearted efforts to create a robust, shared identity that would be inclusive of the Kurds and Shiʿa. Instead, the landlord-shaykhs and wealthy town Arabs who dominated the government largely left unchanged what was, at root, a thoroughly unrepresentative state. Self-interested and with little commitment to genuine democracy, they focused on engaging in intra-elite factional struggles and on using the state’s powers of coercion and patronage to their advantage, just as they had in the 1930s. Largely Sunni Arabs themselves, the members of the ruling factions saw little to gain from ending the Sunni dominance of Iraq that had existed from the start of the mandate. Thus, despite the substantial coercive powers it continued to hold, the Iraqi state remained a weak one that in 1945 enjoyed only marginally more legitimacy or connection to the people than it had when it had become independent in 1932.

Interwar Egypt: The Liberal Age

A British protectorate rather than a mandate, Egypt seemed substantially further along the road to genuine independence than did Iraq at the start of the interwar era. It had a well-established monarchy, exercised substantial autonomy, and was in the process of drafting a constitution. It even had a popular, well-established political organization that could connect the people to the state: Saad Zaghul’s (1859-1927) Wafd Party. As such, despite Britain’s retention of a powerful position in the country thanks to the Four Reserved Points, Egypt appeared poised to emerge as a stable, independent, and democratic state in the early 1920s.

The imminence of self-rule in Egypt was, in fact, an illusion. In reality, neither genuine independence nor the institutionalization of a robust system of representative government were at hand. Instead, thanks to a combination of British manipulation, royal obstruction, and Wafd Party elitism, Egypt failed to establish the civic-political culture needed to legitimate the state and to bind its people to the liberal political order. As a result, after the Second World War, the country would experience the spread of political violence, the rising power of undemocratic and extremist non-parliamentary movements, and, most importantly, the complete delegitimization of the liberal system, developments that would, collectively, doom the constitutional order to a quick demise.

Constitution and Democracy

In contrast to the despair that Egypt would experience immediately after the Second World War hopes ran high in 1922 that full independence was imminent. Indeed, the Egyptian people at that time were enthusiastically working to establish the contours of the new government that they believed would lead them to full independence. They focused first on drafting a constitution. Taking effect in 1923, it reflected divergent ideologies. On the one hand, it guaranteed basic rights and ensured through the adoption of universal male suffrage that the Egyptian people had a strong voice in the government. On the other, it vested an unusual degree of authority in the king, giving him the power to prorogue parliament, to dismiss cabinet ministers, to veto legislation, and to name two-fifths of the members of parliament’s upper house.

Egypt followed in 1924 with its first parliamentary elections under the new system. To the surprise of no one, the Wafd Party won a decisive victory and Zaghul took office as the country’s first prime minister. It was a heady time. With the Wafd Party promising to negotiate an end to the Four Reserved Points, the country appeared ready at last to become a fully independent, democratic state.

The Trials of Representative Government

However, it failed to do so. In fact, Egypt would have a peculiarly difficult time securing full independence under the direction of the Wafd Party. What explained this failure? Why in spite of having both broad popular support and a large majority in parliament, was the party unable to achieve its primary goal? The answer lay in the peculiar structure of Egyptian politics in the interwar era. During the 1920s and 1930s, three power centers, Britain, the king, and the Wafd Party, defined the structure of the Egyptian political system. Each had a different goal. While the secular Wafd sought genuine independence and representative government, King Fuad (r.1922-1936) instead strove to establish a royal dictatorship. In the background, meanwhile, London worked to retain the informal control over Egypt and the Suez Canal that the Four Reserved Points had accorded it. The result was a tripartite struggle that saw the parties form shifting alliances to achieve their policy objectives. At times, Britain and the Wafd collaborated to contain the monarch, as their interests were generally more closely aligned. However, it was more typically the British and Fuad who cooperated to frustrate the Wafd’s efforts to achieve its goals. As a result, the Wafd Party’s efforts to renegotiate the terms of Egypt’s relationship with Britain or to shift power from the monarch to the legislature met with repeated failures.

Indeed, a cyclical pattern soon took shape. Each phase would begin with the Wafd Party winning a decisive electoral victory that gave it a mandate to seek full independence from London. Taking advantage of the vast authority that the constitution vested in him, Fuad would then use a conflict, typically an impasse in the negotiations, to assert his authority. He would dismiss the cabinet, dissolve parliament, and install a pliable government that was beholden to him. The palace would then rule the country autocratically for several years. Eventually, a new political conflict would emerge that would compel the king to call new elections. The Wafd would once again win a substantial majority, after which the cycle would once more repeat.

The pattern first took shape immediately following the Wafd’s huge victory in the elections held in January 1924. Having secured a large parliamentary majority on the basis of Zaghul’s promise to achieve full independence, the party immediately opened talks with London aimed at attaining complete sovereignty. For a time, hopes ran high that Egypt would soon be fully independent. To the consternation of the Wafd, however, the negotiations deadlocked over the question of whether London or Cairo would control Sudan. The diplomatic impasse, and the subsequent assassination in Cairo of the British governor-general of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, then created a crisis that compelled Zaghul to resign. Using the powers that the constitution had vested in him, Fuad followed by dissolving parliament and by naming a new cabinet consisting of royalist favorites who were disinclined to continue the push for full independence. As a result, and to Zaghul’s dismay, the talks he had opened with Britain ended without Egypt securing its independence. It was a bitter pill for a man who had fought so hard and for so long for Egyptian independence. The negotiations were also his last hurrah: dying just three years later, he never again headed the government.

The cycle repeated several more times before culminating in the temporary end of democratic rule in the early 1930s. Ironically, the retreat from democratic government came in response to the Wafd’s growing success. Running once again on a platform calling for negotiations aimed at achieving full independence, the party won a resounding electoral victory in 1929 that made its new leader, Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879-1965), the prime minister. Genuine independence once more seemed imminent. Unfortunately for the Wafd, al-Nahhas was no more successful than Zaghul had been at translating electoral victory into diplomatic progress, and the talks again broke down over the question of whether London or Cairo would rule the Sudan. Worse, the deadlock once more presented Fuad with a golden opportunity to assert his power. Taking advantage of the crisis, he secured al-Nahhas’s resignation and appointed a new prime minister, the autocratic royalist, Ismail Sidqi (1875-1950), and tasked him with implementing a new constitution that vested nearly all power in the monarchy. Once it was enacted, Fuad himself ruled Egypt as royal dictator while the Wafd could only look on, impotently, from the sidelines.

As these events make clear, Fuad and the British bore most of the responsibility for both the Wafd’s difficulties and for Egypt’s failure to develop a robust democratic system in the interwar period. Indeed, both parties worked assiduously to foil the will of the Egyptian people. At the same time, however, the Wafd itself was far from blameless, either for the predicament it found itself in during the early 1930s or, more broadly, for the failings of Egyptian democracy. Its shortcomings were largely the product of the values and outlook of its leadership. While the Wafd was by far the largest political organization in Egypt and stood as the self-described champion of the liberal order, it was, ironically, not itself a democratically structured organization. Instead, dominated by educated, affluent members of the middle class, the party was an elitist institution that greeted bottom-up political activities with great suspicion and that saw little utility in institutionalizing democratic practices. As such, it made no meaningful effort to engage with or organize the Egyptian masses.

The result was good neither for the party nor for Egyptian democracy writ large. Having failed either to mobilize the masses or to bind them to the state, the Wafd ended up with electoral support that was broad but shallow and thus unreliable. More importantly, the party’s lack of interest in connecting the people to the democratic state or in building the robust civic-political culture on which stable representative government ultimately rests meant that Egyptian democracy never developed deep roots, an issue that would emerge as a serious problem in the postwar era.

The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, 1936

The cyclical political pattern finally broke in the mid-1930s thanks to a change in British policy. To that point, London had tacitly supported royal government in Egypt because neither Sidqi nor Fuad challenged its position in the country. By the middle of the decade, however, evolving international circumstances compelled it to reexamine that approach. Against the backdrop of the broader threat that the rise of fascism in Europe posed to British security, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 dramatically raised the stakes in Egypt. Were disgruntled Egyptian nationalists to throw in with the fascist states during time of war, defending the Suez Canal would be immeasurably more challenging. London thus concluded that it needed to quickly secure a compromise agreement with Cairo that would satisfy Egyptian demands for independence while simultaneously permitting Britain to retain its critical base complex along the canal. However, there was one hitch. British officials believed that only a treaty negotiated by a popularly elected government would be legitimate in the eyes of the Egyptian people; in other words, Egypt would need to revert to democratic rule before productive talks could occur.

Accordingly, London joined the Wafd in demanding that the king restore the constitution of 1923 and that he hold new elections. Facing intense domestic and international pressure, Fuad had no choice but to schedule a vote for the spring of 1936. To no one’s surprise, the Wafd won another decisive victory in the election, and al-Nahhas once again became prime minister. Coupled with the accession of the popular new king, Faruq (r. 1936-1952), following the death of his father in early 1936, the subsequent opening of talks created a surge of optimism in Egypt. The country once more appeared to be on the cusp of real independence.

With both sides looking to conclude a deal, the negotiations quickly produced a settlement. Structured as a twenty-year defensive agreement, the Treaty of Preferential Alliance signed in August 1936 satisfied each party’s primary objectives. London kept control of Sudan, retained the right to station 10,000 troops in the Canal Zone during peacetime and an unlimited number during time of war, and secured a provision calling for it to come to Egypt’s assistance should that country be threatened with invasion. In exchange, it ceded responsibility for the protection of minorities and foreigners to the government in Cairo, assented to the abolition of the hated capitulations, and, most importantly, agreed to fully recognize Egypt’s sovereignty, thus paving the way for it to join the League of Nations and to oversee its own foreign policy. It was a momentous occasion. To the jubilation of most Egyptians, their state had finally won its formal independence.

Challenges to the Liberal Order

However, not everyone shared in the enthusiasm about the agreement. On the contrary, bitterness regarding its limits fed a growing dissatisfaction with both the Wafd and Egypt’s broader democratic order. Criticism of the party came from all sides. Secular rightists such as the small-but-growing Young Egypt Party attacked the Wafd by arguing that the treaty al-Nahhas had negotiated had not ended Britain’s colonial position in Egypt but had instead merely obscured it in the guise of a defensive alliance. Though their reasons differed, feminists were equally vociferous in their condemnation of the Wafd and Egypt’s constitutional order. Decrying the party and the government for their culpability in the ongoing subjugation of women, they sought a series of legal and social reforms. They demanded female suffrage, called for the creation of jobs for women, pressed for the legalization of birth control and abortion, and appealed for sweeping cultural changes such as permitting wives to have an identity outside of marriage. On the left, meanwhile, mounting disenchantment with the Wafd Party’s failure to address the Great Depression’s impact on the lower classes helped fuel the growing popularity of a communist party among the skilled workers and intelligentsia of Cairo. While it remained small, the party would prove to be unusually influential. As we shall see, many of the policies that it popularized, including, most importantly, the idea of central economic planning, would powerfully influence the policies of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (r. 1952-1970) Arab-nationalist government beginning in the 1950s.

Despite the lasting influence of their economic policies, however, the communists proved unable to capitalize on growing disillusionment with the liberal order to win mass appeal. Instead, it was a relatively new Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, that was able to take advantage of the secular Wafd Party’s missteps to emerge as Egypt’s most important non-parliamentary opposition movement in the interwar era. Founded in 1928 by a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), the organization was initially a typical Muslim charitable society that provided education and jobs to the poor. However, it did not retain this orientation for long. Instead, influenced by the ideas of Islamic modernists such as Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), the brotherhood soon adopted an explicitly political approach that called for Egypt to abandon liberal, Western-style secularism in favor of a government based on Islamic principles.

It is important to note that the Muslim Brotherhood was, unlike the Wahhabi movement, backward looking. That is, it neither repudiated modern economic arrangements nor condemned Western science and technology. What the brothers did reject, however, was the Wafd Party’s view that modern economic practices and technologies should be embedded in a Western-style social system. Arguing that such an approach had merely served to exacerbate inequality and to weaken the governments of those Muslim states that had pursued it, the Brotherhood instead maintained that Western technologies and systems could only benefit Muslims if those practices were embedded in a social arrangement that was based firmly on Islamic social values. It proved to be a highly appealing message. Blending the benefits of modernity with familiar touchstones, it resonated strongly with many lower- and middle-class Egyptian Muslims. Indeed, in conjunction with the Brotherhood’s strong anticolonialism and implementation of successful economic development projects, it resulted in the organization emerging after World War II as the most important popular opposition movement in Egypt.

Thus, in spite of the treaty with Britain, the Wafd party and the broader parliamentary system that it represented had begun to see their standing decline in the late 1930s. The liberal order’s failure to achieve complete independence, meaning one in which there was no British presence in Egypt whatsoever, had subjected it to a barrage of criticism from opposition groups spanning the political spectrum. Likewise, the Wafd Party’s inability to ameliorate the economic impact of the Great Depression or to satisfy the demands of Egyptian feminists had gradually eroded its base of support. Still, it is important to keep the party’s situation during the late 1930s in perspective. Popular feelings toward it may have been more tepid than in the past, but the events of the interwar period including the treaty signed in 1936 had hardly ended its appeal or cost it the backing of most Egyptians.

World War II and the Abdin Palace Incident

It was the Wafd Party’s inability to navigate the tricky events of World War II that ultimately discredited both the party and the broader constitutional order. From the very start of the war, Egyptians chafed at London’s substantial interference in their country’s internal affairs. As per the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, London compelled Cairo to impose martial law and censorship, to permit hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth forces to occupy bases in the country, and to break relations with Germany. It also succeeded in forcing the dismissal of a pro-Axis prime minister and a prominent general. Coming on top of near famine conditions and the biting inflation that wartime economic disruptions had caused, these events embittered Egyptians of all social classes and left many disillusioned with the Wafd and the liberal order for their failure to deliver on the promise of real independence.

Ultimately, however, it was neither the war’s impact on Egypt’s economic health nor the restrictions that the treaty had placed on the country’s independence that turned people against the liberal order. On the contrary, it was a single event. It was the Abdin Palace Incident of February 1942 that fatally wounded the credibility of Egypt’s parliamentary system. The episode grew out of a change in Egyptian leadership earlier that year. Angry that Prime Minister Hussein Sirri (1894-1960) had broken diplomatic relations with a German ally, Vichy France, without first seeking royal input, Faruq had secured the prime minister’s resignation in early 1942. In less-fraught times, the British might have been willing to let this action slide. With Germany’s powerful Afrika Korps mounting an offensive in Libya toward the Egyptian frontier, however, London felt that it needed to respond aggressively to Faruq’s move in order to ensure its position in the country. Accordingly, at a meeting with the king at his residence, the Abdin Palace, on the evening of February 4, 1942, Ambassador Miles Lampson (1880-1964) issued a blunt ultimatum: either appoint Wafd leader al-Nahhas as prime minister or abdicate. With little room to maneuver thanks to the fact that Lampson had preemptively arranged for British tanks to surround the palace, the king quickly acceded to the ambassador’s demands. Believing that he could secure additional resources for Egypt if he assumed control of the government, al-Nahhas also agreed to go along with Lampson’s demands. As a result, the crisis came to a speedy end.

Despite its quick conclusion, however, the Abdin Palace Incident irrevocably damaged the position of all three parties. Faruq’s failure to abdicate or even to stand up to the British utterly destroyed his standing with the Egyptian people. Meanwhile, though Lampson’s naked interference in Egypt’s internal affairs had secured London’s immediate ends, the move also produced a huge upsurge in anti-British sentiment that imperiled Britain’s long-term presence in the country. If London and Faruq had weakened their respective positions, however, the Wafd had, through its willingness to assume power behind British bayonets, all-but destroyed its popular standing and nationalist credentials. Thereafter, it hemorrhaged support to movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood that had remained uncompromising in their opposition to the British.

Egypt After World War II

With the liberal order discredited and with resentment toward the British surging to new heights, Egypt began to descend into political chaos following World War II. The prime movers of the country’s political collapse were the non-parliamentary groups that had been steadily gaining strength since the signing of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. Believing that its time was at hand, the most important of those organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood took steps to complete the destruction of the liberal system and to force a complete break with London following the war. It organized demonstrations to protest the failings of the liberal government, ordered a wave of assassinations including the shocking murder of Prime Minister Ahmad Mahir (1888-1945) in parliament in February 1945, and organized increasingly violent riots against the continued British presence in Egypt. The worst clash occurred in Cairo in February 1946. Facing a huge crowd of students and workers attempting to storm their barracks, British troops opened fire with machine guns; when the smoke cleared, twenty-three Egyptians lay dead and more than one hundred were injured.

Despite the chaos, the liberal order nearly succeeded in redeeming itself late in 1946. Reappointed prime minister that year, Sidqi initiated negotiations with London aimed at finally securing the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt. After several rounds of difficult talks, he and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin (1881-1951) succeeded in hashing out a tentative agreement that called for London to remove its remaining forces from the Canal Zone. As a result, for a brief and exciting moment, complete independence at last appeared to be at hand. Once again, however, negotiations between Egypt and Britain broke down over the status of Sudan. Bevin and Sidqi’s effort to finesse the issue of which party would control that territory ultimately failed to appease either the Wafd or British imperialists. As a result, the talks soon came to a bitter end amid a flurry of finger pointing and bickering over who was to blame for their collapse.

Thereafter, the liberal order steadily lost what little support it had managed to retain. Over the rest of the decade, it faced constant criticism from the non- parliamentary political movements and took the blame for Egypt’s disastrous involvement in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It also lost legitimacy as a result of a surge in political violence that included the Muslim Brotherhood’s assassination of Prime Minister Nuqrashi (1888-1948) in December 1948 and the government’s retaliatory killing of al-Banna in February 1949.

The constitutional system might have survived even these serious challenges had the Wafd Party previously built close links between the Egyptian people and their government during the interwar era and thus established the strong civic-political foundation on which the stability and success of representative government depends. Having failed to do so, however, the party found itself utterly incapable of arresting the collapse in support for the constitutional order that occurred in the late 1940s. Thus, by the end of the decade, Egypt’s liberal age, begun with such high hopes just a few decades earlier, was nearly at an end.

Syria

Syria’s experience under the mandate system was every bit as frustrating as Egypt’s or Iraq’s. Despite Paris’s claims that it was bringing representative government and modernity to the country, the French made little effort to establish a durable democratic political system in Syria or to create strong links between the country’s people and their government. On the contrary, in an effort to perpetuate continued French control, they imposed a system of direct rule on the mandate designed to deprive Syrians of the opportunity to gain experience in self-government, and they divided the country along confessional lines in order to prevent the emergence of a unified nationalist resistance movement. As a result, when Syria finally won its independence following World War II it lacked the experienced administrators, durable political institutions, and established civic-political culture needed for its government to function effectively or even to maintain political stability.

The Division of Syria

From the start, the French approach to Syria reflected its transparently imperialist goals. With longstanding economic and cultural interests in the region, France had intended since early in the First World War to make Syria a permanent addition to its empire and had viewed the mandate system as little more than a device to appease critics like US President Woodrow Wilson (r. 1913-1921). Unsurprisingly, in light of these goals, Paris moved to satisfy its mandatory obligation to prepare Syria for self- government in a manner that was largely performative. Thus, while High Commissioner General Henri Gouraud (1867-1946) may have scrupulously established representative political institutions and made a point of bringing educated Syrians into the mandatory administration, he also took steps to ensure that those governing structures were powerless and that French advisors rather than Syrian officials made all meaningful decisions. More broadly, Gouraud not only failed to foster any meaningful positive connection between the Syrian people and its government, but actively worked against the establishment of such links

France also pursued a cynical strategy of divide-and-conquer in Syria in which it split the mandate into a series of statelets. Gouraud’s Secretary General and successor as High Commissioner, Robert de Caix (1869-1970) oversaw this effort. He began to put it into effect in 1920 by creating the predominantly Christian state of Lebanon. Later, he established microstates for two comparatively small religious communities: the Alawites, a heterodox Shiʿa sect that predominated along Syria’s northern Mediterranean coast, and the Druze, a syncretic ethno-religious group that occupied the mountainous south. For reasons we shall explore in a moment, De Caix opted to rule them indirectly through existing tribal leaders according to a model pioneered by French colonial authorities in Morocco. Finally, he also created two Sunni Arab microstates, Aleppo and Damascus, that France would rule directly.

The division of the mandate promised to pay substantial dividends for the French. Direct rule of Aleppo and Damascus, which colonial officials combined into a single state in 1925 as part of a cost-cutting bid, would permit them to maintain close control of the educated, urban Sunni notables that they viewed as the biggest threat to continued French rule, particularly the former Ottoman bureaucrats and military leaders whom they correctly suspected of attempting to organize an anti-colonialist nationalist movement. Meanwhile, the division of Syria into multiple states would also limit the ability of the urban elite to establish ties with the rural population and would thus forestall any effort to create a mandate-wide anticolonial movement. Finally, the establishment of religiously based microstates promised to create constituencies that were dependent on France for their continued autonomy and would thus assist the French in retaining control of the mandate. In sum, it was a nakedly imperialistic strategy but also a shrewd and well-thought-out one that seemed likely to ensure that Syria remained a French possession for a long time.

The Great Syrian Revolt, 1925-1927

Unfortunately for de Caix’s successor, Maurice Sarrail, (1856-1929), just as British historical and anthropological knowledge had proven to be a poor guide to Iraq, so, in two ways, did French assumptions turn out be disastrously off the mark in Syria. First, France’s divide-and-conquer approach failed to keep the different confessional groups from organizing together against them. Second, the religious minorities that Paris had assumed would back their rule not only failed to help the French but also took an active part in resisting them. Ironically, in fact, it was one of those groups, the Druze, that played the lead part in precipitating the most substantial challenge to their control of the mandate: the Great Syrian Revolt of 1927.

France’s unwillingness to respect Druze autonomy sparked the rebellion. Overseen by an arrogant and domineering French officer, the Druze chafed from the start of the mandate at interference in their internal affairs and at efforts to impose unpopular reforms. Sarrail compounded the situation by refusing to meet with a delegation to hear their grievances in the spring of 1925. It was a snub that proved to be the final straw for many Druze leaders including the powerful Sultan Pasha al-Atrash (1888- 1982). Concluding that his people would never enjoy real autonomy so long as the French remained in Syria, he began organizing a massive revolt in 1924. He understood that his people faced an uphill fight against the French. He thus made contact with the Arab nationalist Dr. Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar (1879-1940), Faisal I’s former foreign minister and the leader of the independence-minded People’s Party, to see if the party would like to launch a coordinated uprising against the French. Believing that an alliance of Druze and Sunni could defeat France, Shahbandar enthusiastically agreed. Accordingly, drawing on Mustafa Kemal’s successful independence campaign in Türkiye as a blueprint, the two men began planning a synchronized rebellion aimed at achieving self-rule and at ending the partition of Syria.

Known as the Great Syrian Revolt, the uprising constituted a serious threat to France’s position in Syria. It began with a series of spectacular Druze victories in the south. In July 1925, Sultan al-Atrash’s troops seized control of the regional capital after decimating a French column of three hundred men. In a triumph that electrified the people of Syria, his forces followed by destroying a huge punitive expedition sent to avenge France’s earlier defeat. The revolt soon spread. Waiting until Sarrail had deployed the bulk of his troops against the Druze, Fawzi al-Qawuqji (1890-1977), a one- time Ottoman military officer, opened a new front two months after al-Atrash’s first victory by leading a Sunni Arab uprising in Hama. Soon forced out of the city by superior French forces, al-Qawuqji and his men relocated to the almost-impenetrably thick orchard groves outside Damascus. From well-concealed bases among the fruit trees, they followed with a series of effective guerrilla attacks against French troops in the capital.

To the horror of the French, the revolt quickly captured the imagination of the Syrian public. Inspired by al-Atrash and al-Qawuqji’s success, people from all of the mandate’s confessional groups joined the rebellion by the thousands. As a result, by the end of the year the uprising had become precisely the kind of threat that the French had so carefully designed their divide-and-conquer policy to prevent: a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, mandate-wide movement dedicated to achieving full independence.

Despite the severity of this challenge, colonial officials were soon able to restore French control of the mandate. Old hands at the game of imperialism, they were neither easily rattled nor shy about using brutal methods to restore order. They began by ordering French artillery to subject Damascus to a punishing, twenty-four-hour bombardment that killed 1,400 people and flattened the old commercial district. When terror attacks such as this one failed to end the uprising, French officials deployed large numbers of fresh troops to the mandate. The reinforced French army soon succeeded in rooting al-Qawuqji’s guerrillas out of the dense orchards that surrounded Damascus and followed by defeating Sultan al-Atrash and restoring control of the Druze microstate. Mopping-up operations continued until early 1927, but the revolt was effectively over by the end of 1926.

Stalemate

The experience of the Great Syrian Revolt left both French imperialists and Syrian nationalists willing to make concessions. For France, the motivating issue was fiscal in nature. The campaign to end the rebellion had proven so unsustainably expensive that it compelled Paris to abandon its commitment to direct rule and to instead seek a less-costly arrangement patterned after the empire-by-treaty system that Britain had established in Iraq. The mandate authorities consequently issued a series of amnesties and permitted the establishment of a moderate, secular political party of conservative landowners and notables called the National Bloc. They also signaled their willingness to enter negotiations aimed at permitting a greater degree of autonomy in the mandate in exchange for formal recognition of France’s strategic and economic interests.

For the elites who dominated the National Bloc, in contrast, the primary factor driving moderation was the vast imbalance in military power that existed in the mandate. By making clear France’s overwhelming military advantage, the suppression of the rebellion had persuaded Syrian nationalists to abandon the effort to achieve independence through the use of force in favor of the more limited objective of greater autonomy through negotiations. Accordingly, the National Bloc indicated that it was willing to take part in talks aimed at achieving a system of indirect rule that it referred to as “honorable cooperation.” Thus, with the two sides now seeking similar goals, the stage was set for discussions aimed at formalizing French interests in Syria in exchange for nominal independence.

Begun with high hopes in the early 1930s, the subsequent negotiations proved frustratingly contentious and failed to produce an agreement. The primary stumbling block was the question of Syrian unity. The French were insistent that the mandate remain divided into multiple statelets. The National Bloc was equally adamant that it be reunified. With the two sides unable to find a way to rationalize their differences on this point, the talks collapsed in failure. Subsequent efforts to restart the negotiations similarly foundered over the parties’ continued inability to find common ground

With frustration once more boiling over in Syria thanks to the failure of the negotiations, the National Bloc shifted in the mid-1930s to a more aggressive approach designed to target the French in the pocketbook. In January 1936, it initiated a non- violent pressure campaign known as the Syrian General Strike. Enjoying near universal support in the mandate, it aimed to shut down the entire Syrian economy in order to stop the flow of tax revenue that underwrote French control of the mandate. This new strategy worked. Confronted with the unpalatable prospect of having to shoulder the cost of the mandate during a time of economic contraction, Paris capitulated and agreed to hold serious negotiations in 1936.

Prospects looked good for an agreement. With war clouds gathering in Europe, the government of leftist Prime Minister Leon Blum (1872-1950) was eager to ensure stability in the mandate. Accordingly, it signaled its willingness to compromise on the question of Syrian unity. With the main stumbling block removed, the ensuing negotiations were productive and soon produced a draft agreement that satisfied both sides’ minimum conditions. Patterned loosely after the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, it granted Paris the right to use two strategic airbases for twenty-five years and required Damascus to back France during time of war. In exchange, the French government agreed to reunify Syria and to recognize its independence. Delighted to have finally secured an agreement, the Syrian parliament enthusiastically approved it in December 1936. Independence at last appeared to be at hand.

However, to the frustration of the National Bloc, even the limited sovereignty envisaged in the treaty remained tantalizingly out of reach. Determined to maintain control of the mandate, France’s influential colonial lobby succeeded in preventing ratification of the treaty in the French senate. Making matters worse, in 1938, the French government agreed to cede the coastal region of Alexandretta in northwest Syria to Türkiye in a bid to keep Ankara from allying with Nazi Germany. It was a bitter pill for Syrian nationalists, and it seemed to make emphatically clear that the National Bloc’s strategy of moderation and compromise had failed to produce results. Indeed, the truth was that Syria was no closer to independence and unity in 1938 than it had been at the end of the Great Syrian Revolt a decade earlier.

World War II and Independence

In the end, it was neither further negotiations nor additional protests that permitted Syria to gain its independence. Instead, it was France’s defeat and occupation in World War II that finally brought the mandate to a close. Even then, independence did not come quickly or easily. Indeed, during the first few years of the war, Syria’s position was essentially unchanged. Controlled by a mandatory government that was loyal to the collaborationist Vichy regime, it remained a de facto colony of France just as it had been prior to the war’s outbreak.

Only in the spring of 1941 did the mandate’s circumstances finally begin to change. They did so as a result of the shifting military balance. Determined to secure the Middle East at a time when German and Italian forces operating out of Libya were threatening the Suez Canal, British soldiers and Free French troops led by future French President Charles de Gaulle (r. 1959-1970) invaded the mandate and quickly overwhelmed its Vichy defenders. It was an important victory for the Allies. Along with the near-simultaneous military operation against the Golden Square in Iraq, it solidified their uncontested control of the Middle East and thus ensured that the region’s oil and strategic bases remained in their hands. If the Allies were thrilled with the outcome of the operation, however, the Syrians were considerably more ambivalent. While they were pleased to be out from under the thumb of the Vichy government, they were unhappy that they were now subject to Free French rule, particularly after de Gaulle declared that his government intended to retain control of Syria following the war.

At that point, however, France and Britain’s longstanding imperial competition resurfaced to the benefit of Syrian nationalists. Eager to push its colonial rival out of the Middle East once and for all, London began to apply pressure on de Gaulle to compel him to relinquish the mandate. With France still under German occupation, the frustrated French leader was in no position to argue and quickly, if begrudgingly, agreed to London’s demands. Once again, as a result, genuine self-government seemed to be imminent.

Syria managed to secure its independence this time, but only after French imperialists mounted a desperate and violent last-minute bid to hang on to the territory. That effort began in the war’s waning days. Determined to retain a dominant position in Syria, Paris refused to withdraw its remaining troops from the country in the spring of 1945 in a transparent effort to blackmail the nationalists into signing a new treaty recognizing France’s long-term interests in the mandate. Enraged by this eleventh-hour attempt to compromise their country’s independence, the Syrian people responded with a series of massive demonstrations against France’s continued presence. Just as it had in 1920 and 1925, Paris replied with violence. Bombarding Damascus with artillery in May 1945, French troops killed over four hundred Syrians and leveled large parts of the city. This time, however, the use of force proved to be France’s swan song in Syria. Looking to bolster its reputation among the Arabs, London quickly forced Paris to end its terror campaign and followed by compelling it to remove its last troops the following year. As a result, after twenty-six-years of French rule, Syria had finally become an independent state.

French rule of Syria may have been comparatively brief, but it nonetheless powerfully, and adversely, shaped the country’s development. To a large degree, the mandate’s legacy was a function not of what the French had done, but of what they had failed to do. Even more so than Britain in Iraq, Paris had made no more than cosmetic attempts to meet its obligation as Syria’s mandatory power to help prepare the country for independence. As a result, at the time it became independent, Syria had neither the experienced administrators nor the durable political institutions that modern states require. More importantly, it lacked the civic-political culture that is so essential for the effective functioning of a representative government.

Moreover, France did not merely fail to foster the development of robust political institutions or strong connections between people and state. Instead, in its efforts to render its control permanent, it also actively saddled the mandate with a destructive political inheritance that all but ensured continued volatility. This legacy had three components. First, Paris’s refusal to ratify the 1936 treaty that the National Bloc had negotiated thoroughly discredited both the political moderates and the broader democratic system that they represented. As a result, Syria’s weak parliamentary government would enter independence burdened by a lack of legitimacy, a condition, as we shall see, that would pave the way for its replacement by a succession of autocratic governments. Second, French reliance on martial law and the naked use of force to ensure its control during the mandate period provided those undemocratic regimes with a brutal, ready-made template that they would make liberal use of to crush any opposition. Finally, the creation of a separate Lebanese state following World War I embittered nationalists who believed that it was rightly a part of Greater Syria and would later lead Damascus to intervene in Lebanon to the detriment of both countries.

Lebanon

Lebanon had a much different experience than its fellow French mandate and would avoid the intense unrest that plagued Syria during the interwar era. Dominated by the Christian Maronites, it instead enjoyed two decades of relative stability under French administration. To many observers at the time, its cohesion seemed to be a direct function of the mandatory government’s decision to give it a peculiar political structure, the confessional system, in which the different religious groups divided power in proportion to their share of the population. Enjoying broad support, that arrangement would become sufficiently entrenched during the mandate period that it would come to form the basis of the system of government that the Lebanese adopted upon gaining independence in 1943.

Mandatory Lebanon

That Lebanon emerged as a separate state was a result of both French imperial ambitions and the aspirations of the Maronite Christian community that dominated the landlocked region of Mount Lebanon. Unlike Syrian elites who universally opposed French rule, the Maronite Christians welcomed Paris’s involvement in the region. They had two reasons for doing so. First, they had a history of close cultural, religious, and economic ties with France stretching back to the nineteenth century. Second, and more importantly, Maronite leaders had territorial and political aspirations of their own. Eager to break free of Muslim rule, they hoped to take advantage of the fluid postwar situation to establish an independent, Maronite-dominated “Greater Lebanon” expanded to its “natural boundaries” through the inclusion of the coastal strip to the west and the fertile Bekaa Valley to the east.

As they were aware, however, the enlarged state that they sought would not be universally popular among the people of the region. Uninterested in living in a Maronite- dominated country, other confessional groups, not to mention Syrian nationalists, were certain to oppose its creation and to work aggressively to prevent its establishment. How could the Maronites overcome that resistance? How could they secure both their independence and the additional territory they would need if they were to have a functional state? The answer, they believed, lay in Paris. By making clear to the French government that they would be happy to accept its suzerainty, they could secure its help in achieving their dream of an enlarged Maronite state.

Paris was more than happy to comply. It did so not for altruistic reasons, however, but instead in furtherance of France’s imperial goals. The French had long used the Maronites as a stalking horse for their interests in the region and saw the establishment of a separate, Christian-dominated Lebanese state both as a way of dividing any potential indigenous opposition to its rule and as an insurance policy that could safeguard its presence in the Levant in the event that Syria became independent. Accordingly, High Commissioner Gouraud enthusiastically announced in September 1920, the establishment of Greater Lebanon and the inclusion within it of the additional territory that the Maronites sought.

However, the creation of the new Lebanese state posed a difficult demographic challenge for the Maronites. While they amounted to 76 percent of the population of Mount Lebanon, they constituted only a negligible minority in the surrounding areas. As a result, while the territory they hoped to add to Mount Lebanon was essential for the establishment of a functional independent state, its inclusion also threatened to dilute the Maronite share of the population to the point that they would no longer be either numerically or politically dominant.

Determined to push forward with a separate Lebanese state, France responded to this challenge in two ways. First, French officials drew the new state’s borders with great care in order to ensure both that the Maronites continued to constitute a majority of Lebanon’s population and that the non-Maronites remained sufficiently divided between Sunni, Shiʿa, Druze, and other groups such that no single religious community had adequate numbers to contest their dominant position. In this effort the French were quite successful: while substantially larger than the Maronites’ traditional power base of Mount Lebanon, Greater Lebanon nonetheless remained 58 percent Maronite with the balance so divided that none of the other confessional groups was strong enough to challenge their preeminent political position. Second, Paris moved to divide the Lebanese through the institutionalization of the confessional system: a political arrangement with antecedents in the old Ottoman millet system that apportioned representation among the country’s confessional groups in proportion to their size. Accordingly, rather than having the seventeen seats on the elected Representative Council open to all people, the French instead divided the positions among the major religious communities in proportion to each groups’ share of the population: ten for the Maronites, four for the Sunnis, two for the Shiʿa, and one for the Druze. This policy, too, proved enormously beneficial to the French. By keeping the Lebanese divided, it succeeded in preventing the emergence of a mandate-wide, anti-French nationalist movement. As a result, in sharp contrast to its experience in neighboring Syria, Paris faced almost no organized opposition to its rule in Lebanon during the mandate era

What these policies could not do, however, was to offset the precipitous drop in French power that had occurred during World War II, a decline that would permit Lebanon to gain its independence. As in Syria, the beginning of the end for France’s control of the mandate came when British and Free French troops seized the country from its Vichy rulers in 1941. Just as it did with regard to Syria, London followed the campaign by compelling de Gaulle to promise to grant the mandate its independence. In no position to refuse thanks to his dependence on Britain, the Free French leader quickly complied. However, as he had been with Syria, he was being disingenuous in doing so. Despite public assurances to the contrary, he and his imperialist supporters remained steadfastly committed to keeping Lebanon within Paris’s sphere and schemed to restore full French control. Given this goal, they grew alarmed in late 1943 when the Lebanese government announced that it intended to strike from its constitution all provisions granting France special powers and privileges in the country. Fearing that those revisions would end any chance of restoring French rule, de Gaulle responded by ordering his soldiers to arrest President Beshara al-Khoury (r. 1943-1952).

The crackdown proved to be France’s last hurrah in Lebanon. Massive demonstrations in Beirut and stiff pressure from Great Britain quickly compelled Paris to capitulate and to free al-Khoury. France managed to preserve limited influence in Lebanon for a few more years, but al-Khoury’s release from custody effectively ended any chance that it might reassert control. Thus, by the end of 1943, Lebanon had secured its full independence.

The National Pact

Having achieved independence, the Lebanese now faced the task of devising a new system of government to replace the mandatory one. Doing so would prove to be tricky in light of the fact that the confessional system through which the French had ruled had created powerful vested interests that were disinclined to cede power to a central state. In response, the leaders of the different sectarian groups negotiated an informal, extraconstitutional power-sharing arrangement called the National Pact that was, in essence, a modified version of the confessional system through which the French had ruled. Designed to ensure that each of the major religious groups enjoyed representation in proportion to its share of the population in 1932, the year of Lebanon’s most recent census, it allocated seats in parliament according to a formula that guaranteed six positions for the numerically dominant Maronites to every five held by representatives of the other confessional groups. In similar fashion, the National Pact divided key positions in the government along religious lines. It stipulated that the president of Lebanon would always be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shiʿa; other cabinet positions were reserved for smaller confessional groups such as the Druze and Greek Orthodox Christians.

At first, the National Pact seemed to be a durable and effective agreement. Under it, Lebanon enjoyed substantial economic growth and a degree of stability that stood in sharp contrast to the experience of Syria and many other Arab states. Indeed, through the mid-1950s, Lebanon enjoyed a reputation as a stable and pragmatic state with a capital so cultured and cosmopolitan it came to be known as “the Paris of the Middle East.” Over the long term, however, the National Pact revealed itself to be enormously problematic for the country. Reinforcing narrow, particularist religious identities, it inhibited the development of a strong civic-political culture that could bind the different confessional groups together into a cohesive whole. In so doing, it institutionalized the division of the country along religious lines and sowed the seeds of both the political strife that marked the mid-to-late1950s and, worse, the long and debilitating civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, the French decision to apportion political power between confessional groups, an action that was designed, at root, to achieve Paris’s imperialist ends, saddled Lebanon with a legacy of conflict and division that has long outlasted its brief time as a French-controlled mandate.

Transjordan

The most stable of the Middle Eastern mandates was the Emirate of Transjordan, so named because it lies on the east side of the Jordan River. About the size of Indiana, the territory came under the rule of Faisal I’s brother, the Emir Abdallah (r. 1921-1951), in 1921 before formally becoming a British mandate in 1922. Thanks to Abdallah’s skilled leadership, this nearly landlocked territory would overcome its peculiar origins and a number of daunting early challenges to develop into a stable, if undemocratic, state.

Transjordan’s relative success is surprising given its accidental, and complicated, emergence as a state. Initially, it had been part of the Arab Kingdom of Syria that Faisal I had established at the end of the First World War. As we have seen, Paris had destroyed his kingdom in July 1920 and had followed by establishing a mandatory regime in Syria. France was unable to incorporate Transjordan into its Syrian mandate, however, since it lay within the region that the Sykes-Picot Agreement had assigned to Britain. As a consequence, after July 1920, Transjordan became a no- man’s land that lacked a recognized government. It remained so until the spring of 1921 when, as part of the “Sherifian Solution,” the Cairo Conference acknowledged Abdallah, who had occupied the territory in the fall of 1920, as the emir of Transjordan. To give legal sanction to this move, Britain appended the territory to the Mandate of Palestine; however, it never intended for the two regions to be unified or for Transjordan to be part of a Jewish homeland. London made this clear in 1922 when it formally announced that the land east of the Jordan River would neither be subject to the Balfour Declaration nor politically connected to Palestine.

Transjordan’s eventual emergence as a relatively stable state is also remarkable in light of the significant issues that Abdallah faced in the early 1920s. Some of those problems were long-term ones. With a population of only 250,000 people, Transjordan was uneasily divided between two groups, the townspeople and the bedouin, and was desperately short of raw materials including ones as basic as water. As a consequence, it remained in dire economic circumstances even in comparison to its impoverished neighbors. The absence of oil within Transjordan’s borders proved to be a mixed blessing. While the emirate lacked the natural resources necessary to develop into an economic powerhouse like Saudi Arabia or Iraq, this same absence insulated it from the intense external pressures exerted by British and American oil interests. Unlike its neighbors to the east and south, Transjordan was spared direct foreign corporate intervention, allowing its political development to proceed with greater autonomy. Transjordan also faced a number of more transitory but still serious problems including rural tax revolts in 1921 and 1922, raids by Ibn Saud’s (r. 1902-1953) al- Ikhwan warriors, and efforts by Zionists and pro-Zionist British officials to depose Abdallah and annex his emirate to Palestine.

On top of those challenges, Abdallah also confronted the fact that native Transjordanians and British officials alike were unhappy about the influence in his government of the Istiqlalis: former officials from Faisal I’s regime in Syria who constituted Abdallah’s closest confidants. Urban Transjordanians opposed the Istiqlalis because they viewed them as an alien ruling class that monopolized the best positions in the bureaucracy; London distrusted them because it perceived them to be troublemakers who might embroil Britain in a crisis with France by raiding Syria. London’s worries about the Istiqlalis rose steadily in the early 1920s as their influence over Abdallah seemed to grow. Indeed, by early 1924, fears that the Istiqlalis were going to drag Britain into a costly conflict with France had become so acute that British officials began to give serious consideration to the idea of replacing Abdallah as emir.

The emir was a more effective leader than the British had initially assumed, however, and he ultimately proved that he could overcome the issues that the mandate faced. Central to his success was his ability to secure good relations with the nomadic tribes. Cultivating close personal connections with the tribal shaykhs, he was able to bind the militarily powerful bedouins to his government. In turn, his links with the tribal leaders led key British officials to come to grasp his value in maintaining order in the mandate. As a result, rather than deposing him, they gave Abdallah an ultimatum in 1924 requiring him to agree to abide by a series of conditions including, most importantly, one demanding that he expel the Istiqlalis from Jordan within five days. Intent on maintaining his grip on the throne, Abdallah agreed, a decision that may have cost him the backing of his old supporters but one that also improved his standing with both native Transjordanians and, more importantly, the British.

Abdallah’s subsequent success in maintaining order in Transjordan and his continued compliance with British wishes solidified his position. His standing rose so high, in fact, that London granted his principality official recognition in 1928 through a treaty that formalized the bilateral relationship. It was a good deal for Abdallah, if perhaps not for his subjects. At the cost of ceding control of Transjordan’s foreign relations to London, the agreement committed Britain to defend the country from external attack, confirmed that Transjordan would not be absorbed into Palestine, and ceded to Abdallah’s government the power to legislate. Importantly, it also allocated funds to strengthen the emirate’s military, the famous Arab Legion. Under the command of a British officer, John Glubb (1897-1986), it soon became the most powerful military force in the Arab world.

Abdallah’s continued willingness to back Britain and his success in sustaining internal stability paid further benefits following World War II. In response to Transjordan’s steadfast support during the conflict, London agreed to grant it full independence in 1946, though it remained in an informal colonial relationship with Britain through the 1950s. Consequently, through Abdallah’s skillful management of relations with the British and his careful cultivation of alliances with powerful tribal leaders, Transjordan was able to transcend its precarious origins and consolidate political authority. These strategies laid the groundwork for the emergence of a comparatively stable and cohesive state, culminating in full independence from Britain in 1946 with the establishment of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The Historical Debate: The Last Ottoman Generation

Scholars have long viewed the interwar era as a critical period in shaping the development of the Middle East. Not only did the imperial powers establish the region’s modern borders between 1920 and 1938, but nearly all of its current-day inter- and intra-national conflicts have their roots in the events of that period. In keeping with this understanding, historians and nationalists alike have long interpreted instances of armed resistance to European rule such as the Battle of Maysalun as the seminal events, indeed, as the defining myths, in the establishment of particularist nationalisms by peoples expressing their newly-roused sense of national identity.

Recently however, the historian Michael Provence has challenged this understanding of the revolts and anti-imperial movements of the 1920s and 1930s. He rejects the view that the early challenges to European hegemony in the interwar Arab states constituted the first stirrings of nationalism. On the contrary, he contends that those resistance efforts were components of a unified movement orchestrated by the final generation of people who identified as Ottoman and whose intent was not to establish new nations but instead to replace the peace settlement and the division of the region with a unified, modern, and autocratic state laid out along lines similar to the late Ottoman Empire.

Provence maintains that the central figures in this effort were men born in the 1880s and 1890s who graduated from the Ottoman Empire’s elite military academies and who served in its armies during World War I. Imbued with the militarist, authoritarian-modernist ideas of the late empire and inspired by \ Mustafa Kemal’s successful effort to overturn the postwar settlement in Anatolia, these officers organized a broad resistance movement aimed at ejecting the European imperial powers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and, especially, Palestine. Theirs was an avowedly transnational effort, one that rejected the borders that the Europeans had applied to the Middle East following World War I and that sought to free the entire region of Western control. Accordingly, movement leaders did not limit their resistance efforts to the states in which they resided, but instead crossed frontiers to fight against the colonial powers. The career of Fawzi al-Qawuqji illustrates this point. A graduate of the Ottoman imperial military academy, he participated in the Battle of Maysalun in 1920, helped start the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925, led a militia force during the Arab Revolt in Palestine in the 1930s, fought against the British in Iraq in 1941, and battled Zionists in 1948. As Provence notes, that someone with al-Qawuqji’s background took an active role in these campaigns was not unusual. Indeed, as he points out, former Ottoman officers led all of the resistance efforts in the Middle East between 1918 and 1948 and did so without regard to the frontiers that the imperial states had demarcated.

Ultimately, the officers who constituted what Provence calls “the last Ottoman generation” failed in their effort to overturn the peace settlement. In fact, despite multiple revolts and insurgencies, they were entirely unsuccessful in their attempts to break Western control of the Middle East. Only as a result of World War II, imperial exhaustion, and Great Power rivalry would the mandates gain full independence, by which point those with an Ottomanist perspective had largely passed from the scene. Still, the Ottoman-trained officers had an enormous influence over the development of the postwar Arab states. While they had failed to push out the imperialists, they did succeed in passing the militaristic, undemocratic authoritarian modernity of the late- Ottoman Empire on to the next generation of nationalist military leaders, the very men who would rule many of the Arab states after the Second World War.

Conclusion

The undemocratic legacy of the last Ottoman generation was far-from obvious in 1945. Instead, to the casual observer, the Arab states that had experienced European rule in the 1920s and 1930s seemed poised to emerge from World War II as relatively stable, civilian-led countries. Lebanon appeared to have arrived at a formula for sharing power among its confessional groups, for example, while Transjordan had found stability by building close ties between the monarch and the nomadic tribes. More importantly, the larger, more populous states of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all had democratic governments dominated by moderate, secular, political parties.

As we have seen, however, the appearance of stability in Egypt and the former mandates was a mirage. With the possible exception of Transjordan, those states had failed to develop either close links with their people or strong civic-political cultures. By the late 1940s, as a result, none of their governments and dominant political parties enjoyed meaningful legitimacy or broad support.

In a calmer era, the moderate elites who dominated those states might have managed to hold on to power and may have even been able to build the civic-political culture on which a state’s legitimacy ultimately rests. Unfortunately for them, however, they did not enjoy the luxury of stable times. Instead, the states they led emerged from colonial dominance just as the contest between Arabs and Zionists for control of Palestine was reaching its culmination in 1948. Already on shaky ground, the moderate elites and the regimes they led lost all credibility thanks to their inability to prevent the establishment of Israel and soon found themselves overthrown by the pan-Arabist officers who succeeded Provence’s last Ottoman generation. We shall now turn to the events in Palestine that would set the stage for their rise to dominance.