Content uploaded by Pinar Bilgin
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Pinar Bilgin on Dec 18, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rgaf20
Download by: [Cornell University Library] Date: 13 October 2016, At: 00:58
Global Affairs
ISSN: 2334-0460 (Print) 2334-0479 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgaf20
What is the point about Sykes–Picot?
Pinar Bilgin
To cite this article: Pinar Bilgin (2016): What is the point about Sykes–Picot?, Global Affairs,
DOI: 10.1080/23340460.2016.1236518
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2016.1236518
Published online: 11 Oct 2016.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 18
View related articles
View Crossmark data
What is the point about Sykes–Picot?
Pinar Bilgin*
Department of International Relations, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent
University, Ankara, Turkey
(Received 4 August 2016; accepted 12 September 2016)
The Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) became (in)famous once again following a tweet
announcing a propaganda video by the group that call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq
and al Sham (ISIS) declaring “the end of Sykes–Picot”. In this essay I suggest that the point
about Sykes–Picot is not about the “artificiality”of borders in the Middle East (for all
borders are artificial in different ways) or the way in which they were drawn (for almost all
borders were agreed on by a few men, and seldom women, behind closed doors) but (also)
that it was shaped by a discursive economy that allowed for the International Society to
decide the fate of those that were deemed as not-yet capable of governing themselves. ISIS
preoccupation with the “end of Sykes–Picot”is conditioned by the same discursive
economy that it apparently seeks to resist.
Keywords: Sykes–Picot Agreement; Middle East; security; ISIS
Introduction
In 2014, the Sykes–Picot Agreement became
(in)famous following a tweet announcing a
propaganda video by the group that call them-
selves the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham
(ISIS).
1
The video showed the group destroy-
ing the border barriers between Syria and
Iraq, signalling the end of a need to control
“national”frontiers; for they have now
become “one people”under ISIS rule (see
Tinsley, 2015). In doing so, ISIS claimed to
bring a physical end to the so-called
“Sykes–Picot order”insofar as both sides of
the border had come under ISIS control. It
was also a metaphorical end in that ISIS was
challenging both the borders and the nation-
state order in the post-First World War
“Middle East”. Since then, “Sykes–Picot”
has been Googled thousands of times and
hundreds of opinion pieces have been
written seeking to answer the question of
whether it is indeed “the end of Sykes–
Picot”as declared by ISIS (see Danforth
2013; Gause III 2014). In this essay, I
suggest that the point about Sykes–Picot is
not about the artificiality of borders (for all
borders are artificial in different ways) or the
way in which they were drawn (for almost
all borders have been agreed on by a few
men, and seldom women, behind closed
doors) but the ways in which Middle East
politics were shaped in century that followed
the First World War.
2
It is not the borders per
se, but life inside and across those borders that
have rendered Sykes–Picot a symbol of the
© 2016 European International Studies Association
*Email: pbilgin@bilkent.edu.tr
Global Affairs, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2016.1236518
century-old regime of top-down, military-
focused, state-centric and statist security gov-
ernance in the Middle East.
The essay is organized in two sections. In
section 1 I offer a brief background on the
Sykes–Picot Agreement and consider the
claim that ISIS did not bring Sykes Picot to
an end because the agreement was never
(fully) implemented. Second, I turn to those
who agree with the need to bring Sykes–
Picot to an end on the grounds that the
borders drawn by the European colonial
powers are “artificial”. Here, I underscore
that where the critics of the so-called “Sykes–
Picot order”wish to replace “artificial”
borders with (presumably) “natural”ones,
ISIS wishes to do away with borders for all
Muslims, therefore challenging the very
notion of “nation-state”. Yet I emphasize that
both ISIS and other critics of the Sykes–Picot
order share similar assumptions regarding “sta-
tehood”and artificiality. In the concluding
section, I submit that while multiple actors
have invoked the symbolism of Sykes–Picot,
none has thus far offered to do away with the
century-old regime of top-down, military-
focused, state-centric and statist security gov-
ernance that the notion of Sykes–Picot order
has come to symbolize. ISIS is no exception
in this regard –notwithstanding the group’s
declarations to the contrary.
This is not the end of Sykes–Picot,
because it was never implemented!
“Sykes–Picot”is the better-known name of the
Asia Minor Agreement negotiated in May
1916 by Sir Mark Sykes (Britain) and
Georges Picot (France) to decide on the post-
First World War fate of the Middle East. The
agreement was kept secret until 1917 when
the Russian revolutionaries divulged the
“secret deals made by the imperialist
powers”. The agreement had to be kept
secret, for it betrayed Britain’s promises to
the Arab peoples who had agreed to join the
fight against the Ottomans in return for prom-
ises regarding the governance of Arab lands.
The degree of British betrayal is disputed
(Rogan, 2015). What is beyond dispute is
that the Sykes–Picot Agreement was less
about the future of the Middle East and more
about the future of British–French rivalry in
this part of the world. As such, the agreement
was concerned not with creating so-called
“viable states”(Ottaway, 2015; compare with
Pursley, 2015) but with furthering British and
French colonial interests.
The agreement concluded by Sykes and
Picot was never fully implemented. It was
revised numerous times. One such revision
came after the Allied Powers lost the war in
Asia Minor (the part of the world that the
agreement was originally named after),
thereby making the way for the formation of
a Republic of Turkey. The Lausanne Treaty
(1923) signed between the Allied Powers and
Turkey decided the newly established Repub-
lic’s borders. What is currently problematized
as the “Sykes–Picot order”was shaped at
San Remo Conference in 1920 but was
further negotiated in the coming years. That
is to say, those who argue that ISIS did not
bring “the end of Sykes–Picot”base their argu-
ment on the historical fact that that particular
agreement was never (fully) implemented.
If this “historical fact”comes across as too
trivial to consider, it is nevertheless worth scru-
tinizing that some feel authorized to “fact-
check”ISIS. I will raise two issues. First, the
fact that the Sykes–Picot Agreement was
morphed into the San Remo consensus of the
Allied Powers (UK, France, Italy and Japan),
and approved later by the League of Nations,
does not render the order that followed any
less of a concern regarding the colonial
legacy in the Middle East. For, after San
Remo, the agreement ceased to be a secret
deal between two colonizing powers and
became a part of the security governance
regime enforced by the international society.
As such, the San Remo consensus and later
the League of Nations approved the colonizing
powers’designs for the Middle East. Second,
the fact that the Sykes–Picot Agreement was
not implemented also had to do with the
ways in which some were more equipped
than others to participate in the drawing of
2P. Bilgin
their boundaries. Following the war of national
independence, Turkey was able to participate in
the drawing of its own borders. Some others
could not. For, at that time, some members of
the international society intervened in the
affairs of those who they portrayed as “back-
ward”by virtue of their “failure”in meeting
the standard of civilization (Bilgin, 2012).
The League of Nations considered it prudent
to impose mandate regimes in some parts of
the Middle East because peoples of this part
of the world were not deemed capable of self-
rule. Those who insist that ISIS did not bring
the end of Sykes–Picot overlook the ongoing
yield of such a discursive economy that
allows some to claim to “know”and/or
“order”others (Neep, 2015).
Sykes–Picot imposed “artificial”borders
–good riddance!
The critics who make the “artificiality”point
do not contest the desire of ISIS to bring the
so-called Sykes–Picot order to an end. They
agree with ISIS that borders in the Middle
East were (largely but not wholly) decided by
European powers under conditions of colonial
rule. They also agree that something needs to
be done about them. However, a closer look
at the solutions the critics of the Sykes–Picot
order offer highlights how far removed they
are from the concerns raised by ISIS. Yet
another look suggests that they share some of
the same Eurocentric assumptions about the
“Middle East”and security governance.
To start with the critics of the Sykes Picot
order, they underscore the fact that regional
peoples themselves were not sitting at the
table when the borders in the region were
drawn, and that is what has rendered the
border between Syria and Iraq (among others)
“artificial”. As a solution, some suggest that
borders should be re-drawn to allow for some
kind of stability (Ashdown, 2014); others
argue that it is impossible to seek to re-order
the region in the absence of superpower
resolve (Gause III, 2014). That both solutions
are as top-down as the creators of the so-
called Sykes–Picot order seems to escape
their proponents (also see Neep, 2015).
Accordingly, the critics fail to note that their
top-down outlook toward the Middle East is
part of the problem highlighted by ISIS.
As regards ISIS, the aforementioned video
explains their reasons in the following way:
Today we are happy to participate in destroy-
ing the borders placed by the tawaghit
[oppressors] to prevent the Muslims from tra-
veling in their lands. The tawaghit broke up
the Islamic Khilafah and made it into
countries like Syria and Iraq, ruled by man-
made laws …today we begin the final stage
after the Ummah was divided …Their plot
was to divide and conquer. That is what they
had done with us. (Quoted in Tinsley, 2015)
Their suggested solution is very different from
the critics above in that they wish to do away
with “nation-states”. Yet their way of doing
this is to set up another state and impose an
order that is no less military-focused and
statist than the existing regime of security gov-
ernance. As such, ISIS and the critics of the
Sykes Picot order share a commitment to the
military-focused, state-centric and statist
regime of security governance that has charac-
terized the Middle East in the past century.
Furthermore, both ISIS and the critics of
the Sykes Picot order share the same Euro-
centric assumption that some borders are “arti-
ficial”and others are “natural”. However, all
borders are artificial insofar as they are
decided by a few men, and seldom women,
behind closed doors. For instance,
Winston Churchill may have drawn the border
between Iraq and Jordan with a pen, but he
was just as central in delineating the border
between France and Germany when he led
the allies to victory in World War II. Deter-
mining whether Alsace and Lorraine would
be French or German was never as simple as
just sending a commission to find out where
the French people stopped and the German
people started –rather, the territory was
awarded as a prize following each of the
Europe’s bloody conflicts. (Danforth, 2013)
In the Middle East, Iran, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia are considered to have “natural”
Global Affairs 3
borders insofar as their representatives partici-
pated in the drawing of those borders either
after a war or at the negotiation table. Further-
more, Turkey’s border with Greece is shaped
by the river Meriç. What could be more
natural than that! Yet it took a League of
Nations sanctioned population exchange
between Turkey and Greece to render the
populations on either side more “homogenous”
(Özsu, 2011). The point is that borders are
always “artificial”insofar as they are drawn
in a top-down manner, without consulting the
people whose lives they run through.
Finally, claiming that borders in the Middle
East are “artificial”is a Eurocentric move that
asserts the agency of European colonial
powers in wreaking havoc in this part of the
world while underestimating the amount of
agency exercised by regional peoples. This is
not to underestimate the destructive conse-
quences of divide and rule tactics employed
by the colonial powers, which is considered as
having “postponed the rise of a new order
shaped from within the region”(Kamel, 2016,
p. 8). Rather, my point is that the critics of the
“artificiality”of Sykes–Picot boundaries, even
as they seek to be self-critical (by virtue of
owning up to the colonial legacy), betray their
obliviousness to the history of the region and
its peoples. As Lorenzo Kamel has maintained,
“modern-day Syria and Iraq have both several
meaningful antecedents in the pre-Islamic
world”and that
the claim that Iraq is an artificial creation con-
cocted by the British after World War I over-
looks the fact that …for much of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries …
Basra, Baghdad and Mōsul were governed
as a single entity with Baghdad as their
center of gravity. Already at the time numer-
ous local intellectuals indicated the area as
“Iraq”. (pp. 8–9; also see Pursley, 2015)
This is not to claim access to “historical facts”
about the region and its peoples. Rather, the
point is that self-styled anti-colonial subjectiv-
ity of ISIS betrays a Eurocentric notion of
“artificiality”and “statehood”that presumes
states to have “natural”borders to make them
“proper”states in a way that is reminiscent of
state “failure”debates of the 2000s. The differ-
ence between ISIS and its critics is that where
the former problematize a century of interven-
tionism in the affairs of the region, the latter
only take responsibility for the Sykes–Picot
moment of the early twentieth century.
Neither of the two challenge century-old top-
down, military-focused, state-centric and
statist regime of security governance. Argu-
ably, it is that very regime of security govern-
ance, which is shaped by the discursive
economy of the international society, that has
allowed for military interventionism in the
Middle East in present-day politics (Jabri,
2013). The critics of the “Sykes–Picot order”
do not challenge the discursive economy that
allowed for that order to be enforced by the
international society. Nor do they challenge
the regime of security governance that was
instated as part of this order.
Conclusion
The point about Sykes–Picot is not (only) that
it was a secret agreement concluded between
the colonizing powers, but (also) that it was
shaped by a discursive economy that allowed
for the international society to decide the fate
of those that were deemed as not-yet capable
of governing themselves. ISIS preoccupation
with the “end of Sykes–Picot”is conditioned
by the same discursive economy that it appar-
ently seeks to resist. That the current discus-
sions about the end of Sykes–Picot are
conducted in a similarly top-down manner
suggests that that the same discursive
economy prevails and continues to shape a
top-down, military-focused, state-centric and
statist regime of security governance. ISIS
does not seek to replace, but to inherit this
regime of security governance. The only
difference being the replacement of “nation-
states”with a state for the Ummah ruled by a
“particular understanding of Islamic law”.
3
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
author(s).
4P. Bilgin
Notes
1. An earlier shorter version of this article was
published at http://www.sdu.dk/-/media/files/
om_sdu/centre/c_mellemoest/videncenter/ar
tikler/2016/bilgin+article+(feb+16).pdf?la=en
2. I am sometimes reminded that Gertrude Bell’s
role as a woman taking part in “inventing”
the Middle East disproves my point. On the
contrary, those who point to Gertrude Bell’s
role help reinforce my point about the persist-
ence of Eurocentrism in the study of the
Middle East. See Bilgin (2016).
3. I put emphasis on “particular”, because ortho-
dox interpretations of Islam impose strict regu-
lations on the exercise of direct violence,
especially against believers of monotheistic
religions and fellow Muslims. It is by obliterat-
ing this orthodox understanding of Islam, and
by imposing its own interpretation that brands
all non-Muslims as “unbelievers”and those
Muslims who do not fit its own brand as “unI-
slamic”, that ISIS seeks to warrant its exercise
of direct violence. This is a particular body of
knowledge about Islam that ISIS wishes to
render prevalent, thereby replacing other com-
peting interpretations of holy texts. As such,
ISIS could be viewed as unleashing its own
kind of “epistemic violence”to warrant its
exercise of direct violence.
Notes on contributor
Pinar Bilgin specialises in critical approaches to
International Relations and Security Studies. She
is the author of Regional Security in The Middle
East: A Critical Perspective (2005), and The Inter-
national in Security, Security in the International
(2016). A full list of publications is available at
www.bilkent.edu.tr/∼pbilgin.
References
Ashdown, P. (2014, August 14). Western interven-
tion over Isis won’t prevent the break-up of
Iraq. The Guardian.
Bilgin, P. (2012). Globalization and in/security:
Middle Eastern encounters with international
society and the case of Turkey. In S. Stetter
(Ed.), The Middle East and globalization:
Encounters and horizons (pp. 59–75).
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bilgin, P. (2016, June). Thinking postcolonially
about the Middle East: Two moments of anti-
Eurocentric critique. Center for Contemporary
Middle East Studies, SDU. Available from:
https://www.google.com.tr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=
&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0ahUKEw
i77uHa-ebOAhXCWhQKHfHKDu0QFggv
MAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sdu.dk%
2F-%2Fmedia%2Ffiles%2Fom_sdu%2Fcen
tre%2Fc_mellemoest%2Fvidencenter%
2Fartikler%2F2016%2Fbilgin%2Barticle%
2B(june%2B16pdf%3Fla%3Den&usg=AFQj
CNEw7MBMGzhq-Smwovdm8qCWBTMTa
Q&sig2=mP5c6zSr8-dja2S4Me1Icw).
Danforth, N. (2013). Stop blaming colonial borders
for the Middle East’s problems. The Atlantic
[Online]. Retrieved from http://www.
theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/
stop-blaming-colonial-borders-for-the-middle-
easts-problems/279561/
Gause III, F. G. (2014, May 20). Is this the end of
Sykes-Picot? The Washington Post.
Jabri, V. (2013). The postcolonial subject: Claiming
politics/governing others in late modernity.
London: Routledge.
Kamel, L. (2016). Artificial nations? The Sykes-
Picot and the Islamic State’s narratives in a his-
torical perspective. Diacronie. Studi di Storia
Contemporanea 25. Online. Retrieved from
http://www.studistorici.com/wp-content/uploa
ds/2016/03/03_KAMEL.pdf
Neep, D. (2015, January 3). The Middle East,
hallucination, and the cartographic imagination.
Discovery Society,16. Retrieved, from http://
discoversociety.org/2015/01/03/focus-the-
middle-east-hallucination-and-the-cartographic-
imagination/
Ottaway, M. (2015). Learning from Sykes-Picot.
WWIC Middle East Program Occasional
Paper Series. Retrieved from https://www.
wilsoncenter.org/publication/learning-sykes-
picot.
Özsu, U. (2011). Fabricating fidelity: Nation-build-
ing, international law, and the Greek–Turkish
population exchange. Leiden Journal of
International Law,24, 823–847. doi:10.1017/
S0922156511000392
Pursley, S. (2015, June 2–3). “Lines drawn on an
empty map”: Iraq’s borders and the legend of
the artificial state (parts I and II) Jadaliyya.
Retrieved from http://www.jadaliyya.com/
pages/index/21759/
Rogan, E. (2015). A century after Sykes-Picot. The
Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Retrieved from
http://www.thecairoreview.com/uncategorized/
a-century-after-sykes-picot/
Tinsley, M. (2015). Whose colonialism? The con-
tested memory of the Sykes-Picot agreement.
POMEPS Blog. Retrieved from http://pomeps.
org/2015/03/06/whose-colonialism-the-conte
sted-memory-of-the-sykes-picot-agreement/
Global Affairs 5
