May 16, 1916: The Sykes-Picot Agreement is ratified.
One hundred years ago today, French and British diplomats signed secret negotiations that would profoundly shape the geopolitics of the Middle East following the defeat and partition of the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was not the singular machination by Western powers to define the post-World War I distribution of power in the Middle East; however, it has singularly come to epitomize the consequences of both the failures of the colonial past and of the strife in the following decades of continuous instability and Western interventionism.
Over the course of approximately five months, two relatively minor British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, roughly outlined the future mandates of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. As pictured above, Sykes and Picot’s map determined that certain areas (shaded blue and pink) would become subject to complete British or French discretion, while others (regions “A” and “B”) would become regions under European spheres of influence.
At the time of the agreement, the war was still far from over, and it was later postwar conferences and settlements that actually set in stone the basic ambitions of partition and imperial optimism outlined in Sykes-Picot. The implications of the mid-war agreement materialized in, among others, the Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923), and overall via the postwar mandate system. A wide range of geopolitical concerns, evolving over the course of war, governed the negotiation of Sykes-Picot, for example: access to the Suez Canal and Persian Gulf; the threats posed by Germany and Russia; access to regional infrastructure and finance; access to oil, in particular fields in Mosul, Iraq; of course, competing French and British claims also pushed and pulled the lines of division.
The terms of Sykes-Picot - and contained within, the flagrant bad faith of the Western negotiators toward Arab aspirations and budding Arab nationalisms - were not known to the public until its terms leaked in full to Russian newspapers in late 1917. This was within weeks of the publication of the Balfour Declaration, which pledged British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine.
The actual direct impact and relevance of the agreement one hundred years on continues to animate debate, but Sykes-Picot nevertheless occupies a special place in the decades-long tableau of turmoil in the Middle East as both the subject of scholarly analysis and as a powerful rhetorical tool, a shorthand for grievances rooted in colonialism. A vivid representation in the popular imagination prevails: of European colonizers drawing up arbitrary “lines in the sand,” divvying up Ottoman lands with no input from their inhabitants, conspiring against Arab leaders, and constructing an untenable system of Arab states whose nonsensical artificiality has magnified the frequency and depth of regional conflict - inadvertently, arrogantly, myopically, shaping the course of history in the Middle East. One famous contemporary - namely T.E. Lawrence - declared the agreement “geographically and politically absurd.”