Question

Is it fair to say that France’s actions have condemned both Syria and Lebanon to both “unstable political systems and societies based on sectarian rivalries”?

Answer 1

The Middle East arose from choices taken by the Allies during and after the First World War, as we understand from today's headlines. The comparatively quiet provinces of the Ottoman Empire were converted by Britain and France into some of the world's least stable and globally explosive nations. The First World War treaties are therefore at the very core of the Middle East's current conflicts and policies. The partition lines in the Ottoman Empire's Arab regions initially set out the conditions of the April-May 1916 secret Sykes-Picot Agreement.The treaty gave Great Britain to Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Gulf and the areas bordering Palestine, and France to Syria and most of the region's eastern portion. Britain's provincial interest concentrated on safeguarding India's path, ensuring inexpensive and available petroleum for the requirements of the Empire, keeping the equilibrium of power in the Mediterranean to its benefit, and protecting its economic issues. France hoped to maintain its centuries-old connections with the Syrian Catholics, to achieve a strategic and financial basis in the eastern Mediterranean, to guarantee a low supply of cotton and silk and to stop Arab nationalism from infecting its North African empire.

The formulation of a Middle East post-war settlement was agreed at the April 1920 San Remo Conference. There were divided the former Ottoman provinces into institutions called mandates. The new mandates were awarded conditionally and under the supervision of the League of Nations, an external authority. These territories ' populations have been arbitrarily and artificially split over the next century. The compulsory powers, Britain and France, outlined fresh desert borders and communal borders. The French went further in Syria, establishing semi-autonomous local states within the framework of a domestic policy.France's customers, the Maronite Christians, were the primary beneficiaries of this territorial partition. French policy has improved the potential for sectarian dispute. With the exception of Beirut, there was a predominantly Muslim population in the fields added to Lebanon, whose members objected to being placed within a Christian-dominated polity. Competition between competing sectarian interests influenced the evolution of Lebanese political life as Muslim groups assaulted the leadership position of the Maronite minority. Greater Lebanon was created to provide a separate political entity to the Maronites in which they were the biggest single group.