Syria, as a nation-state, did not exist until 1945, when it became a founding member of the United Nations. From 1920, following the fall of the Osmanlis, it had been under a French Mandate. Before that, modern Syria was an administrative division of the Osmanlis, within the larger Syria province, which included much of the Levant.
Between 1945 and 1963, when the Baathists came to power, Syrian politics was marked by constant upheaval—coup after coup—while trying to establish a political system, a form of social nationalism, that did not emerge organically from its own history but was instead imported from the West. There was even an attempt to form a United Arab Republic with Egypt in 1958, which eventually paved the way for the Baathist takeover.
From 1963, the Baathist movement, rooted in Arab socialism, took control, but internal struggles persisted until 1970, when Hafez al-Assad seized power. Assad consolidated and centralized authority, reshaping Baathist ideology to establish his own dynasty and fuse it with Alawite belief, an offshoot of Shiism that even Shias originally did not accept. This effectively set up the rule of a religious minority with a Western-inspired political ideology over a Sunni majority to whom they were politically and religiously alien.
Such a rule can survive only in two ways: first, through a terror-inducing police state that suppresses dissent; second, through external alliances that grant recognition to such a regime, enabling it to operate internationally. While the social reality was more nuanced due to the diverse minorities within Syria’s borders, these were defining traits of the Assad regime for its entire duration.
The regime also justified its power by invoking the idea of a nation-state that transcended religious and ethnic divisions. However, this was true only insofar as one accepted the Assad family’s definition of religious socialism, because as a nation-state, Syria lacked unifying elements. There was no foundational myth, no common language, no shared religion or ethnicity. Which raises the question: what was Syria before that?
For centuries, Syria was part of the Osmanli Devlet, the term the Ottomans used for their polity. It is misleading to translate Devlet as “empire” or “state.” This is the claim of Professor Mehmet Maksudoğlu, a Turkish historian, in his book Osmanli History and Institutions. He argues that, according to Osmanli sources, they never referred to themselves as “İmparatoriyye-i Osmaniyye,” but rather as “Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osmaniyye,” which translates as “The Sublime Osmanli Devlet.”
Why does this matter? Devlet comes from the Arabic dawlat, meaning something that changes, rotates, or alternates. It can also be understood as “polity.” Translating it as “state”, with the Western connotation of the term, would be incorrect, because a state implies something fixed, while the term implies something in flux. According to Maksudoğlu, the Osmanlis did not view themselves as either a state or an empire—at least not until the Tanzimat reforms, aimed at centralization, in the mid-nineteenth century. The term also connotes circulation and exchange, which, when applied to governance, carries an economic dimension.
This understanding of political organization was reflected in their government and institutions. According to Maksudoğlu, a large majority of the Osmanli sadrazams and vazirs were not Turkish, similar to many members of the elite corps of the army, which was not fully centralized. The Osmanlis also lacked centralized systems for education, healthcare, or social services, as these were largely managed by independent awqaf, which can be loosely translated as private social foundations.
Many other features distinguished Osmanli rule from that of a Western empire or later nation-state, but perhaps the most important was the purpose of the socio-political order. For the Osmanlis, the role of political authority was to enable the establishment and flourishing of Islam. Sovereignty and legislative authority did not ultimately belong to rulers but to God, and in Sunni Islam, there is no divinely appointed ruler (though there is in Shiism).
From this concept of sovereignty emerges the idea of the Ummah, which, according to Wadah Khanfar, former Director-General of Al Jazeera and author of The First Spring: Political & Strategic Praxis of the Prophet of Islam, is a political one. According to Khanfar, the Ummah was a suprapolitical community to which various Islamic powers—often in conflict with one another—were connected. When the Crusaders invaded the Middle East, the Fatimids of Egypt initially saw them as an opportunity to challenge the Abbasids, but later allied with them when faced with the greater collective threat posed to the Ummah.
The concept of the Ummah as a political entity was not strictly tied to being Muslim. For the first two centuries of Islamic expansion across the Middle East and Central Asia, about 70% of the population was not Muslim. Ethnicity, language, or culture was therefore not decisive in being part of the Ummah or later the Osmanli Devlet: if you were Muslim, or agreed to be ruled by them, you could be accepted within the Muslim polity.
This is, of course, an idealized version; the reality was far more nuanced and often contradictory. But it is important to understand that this was a widely recognized and accepted framework, and rulers could be called upon to uphold its standards. One might dislike Islam or the Osmanlis, but the fact remains that until the early twentieth century, Syria and much of the Middle East operated under a political paradigm very different from that of the West at the time.
Another key difference in this paradigm was economic organization. The rise of the nation-state is inseparable from the rise of banking and capitalism. One could argue that the concept of the nation-state began to take shape with the Westphalian Treaties of 1648, following the Thirty Years’ War, and culminates with the end of what De Gaulle called the “Second Thirty Years’ War,” in 1944.
This period of roughly three centuries coincided with the rise of the banking system. The Bank of England, founded in 1694—while not the first bank—was the first to which a nation became indebted. The end of World War II brought about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
This is no minor detail. Fiat currency and banking were prohibited by virtually all Islamic scholars until the early twentieth century. It was only after the fall of the Ummah as a political concept, the colonization of Arab and Muslim-majority lands, and the perception of Western superiority that Islamic scholars began to permit fiat currency and banking institutions. In fact, one could argue that the Osmanlis lost not on the battlefield but on the financial front—a claim supported by the fact that Türkiye was never colonized militarily, but the Osmanlis lost the financial war against the West.
The monopolization of the economy through control of the money supply is as central to the nation-state as the monopolization of violence. Together with the purpose of the social organization, these elements create a social paradigm fundamentally different from that of the Osmanlis.
Today’s Syrian government is attempting to build a centralized nation-state, but Wadah Khanfar argues that this concept remains alien to the Arab world. One could speak of an Arab nation, but that would encompass at least 20 current states. According to him, this very concept—imported from the West and imposed by the French and British—has fueled the turmoil that now engulfs the Middle East.
A brief word about the current government of Syria, as many readers will be frowning. Many Western commentators, both from the mainstream and alternative media, insist on calling Al-Sharaa and his troop a “bloodthirsty jihadi terrorist” one. I have no sympathies for them nor their ideology. However, what is terrorism and who is a terrorist? Who gets to label others as terrorists? Who is a jihadist and why?
No question that Al-Sharaa, before known as Al-Jolani, and his people might have committed crimes in Syria. But so did Hafez and Bashar al-Assad—and much worse—and so have the Shia militias, and so has the US and the West, on a scale far bigger than all of them together. I will refer to two Syrian commentators, Alexander McKeever and Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who, being in the region and not particularly inclined towards Al-Sharaa, avoid using these labels and have a much more balanced and nuanced understanding.
What is obvious is that neither Syria nor the rest of the Middle East can return to a political organizational system that no longer exists. What is less obvious is whether they should move forward toward the nation-state model—a system that has neither brought peace nor prosperity to the region and which itself shows signs of exhaustion at its roots.
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One might suggest whether “nation state” even makes sense…or indeed what exactly a “nation” is.
Ultimately, a “nation” is an internally cohesive grouping that somehow inspires trust and cooperation among its members. Shared cultural, religious, and linguistic ties may help, but it’s hardly guaranteed: I’m constantly surprised that how mutually intelligible languages of recently separated pairs of “nations” are (and how close otherwise their cultures are)–Swedish and Norwegian, Czech and Slovak, and so on. But they don’t think they belong to the same nation, well, you have to find other means onto coexistence and, where possible, cooperation, if they seek it.
One trouble is that if the outsiders think two tribes of wogs look alike, they ought to be dealt with in the same way, preferably via the same conduit(s) that are convenient to them. This does not fundamentally change the local picture–they still have to find some means to (and terms of) coexistence, but the avsilable paths change, that is all.
One of my favourite travel books is Patrick Leigh Fermors ‘A Time of Gifts‘, based on his walk across Europe in the early 1930’s. One of his observations was how he was able to keep communicating with people as languages (and culture) bled into each other as he crossed ‘boundaries’ from the Netherlands to Germany and listened to all the many dialects on the way. National boundaries that feel ‘real’ are, in my experience, more the exception than the rule (ironically, one of these is in the news now – Cambodia-Thailand – this is perhaps the most dramatic border crossing I’ve ever experienced).
Two decades ago I spent some time wandering on my bike across Jordan, Syria and Lebanon – on at least one occasion I crossed a border without even realising it (not a safe thing to do in that region, it was down to my poor map reading skills).
Languages vs. statehood and national control are a huge issue not talked about much (any more).
Being technically a non-native to where I live I struggled for many years to understand why regions in Germany regarded themselves as so special. I still find it odd when inhabitants from “Pfalz” or “Franken” talk about themselves as if they were in fact “different”. The “German” concept here is rather secondary as an issue. Which I however very much welcome. Of course “German” is not being discarded but the regions regard themselves as special and of relevance for the inhabitants and that is based a lot on dialects. That of course is significant when it comes to borders and similiarities. And the artificial nature of borders.
(Which makes the Ukraine War and the whole conundrum Russia finds itself in vis-a-vis foreign powers meddling at those borders so odd and idiotic. To quote Saladin in the movie “Kingdom of Heavens” when he speaks about whether Jerusalem is important: “It´s nothing – it´s everything.”)
It’s interesting to take for granted that Syria is an Arab state and the Middle East is a Muslim majority region. Native Syrians are Arabized (like Iraqis, Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians, etc) and coverts to Islam, which arrived by the sword from the Arabian peninsula. Ottoman rule arrived by an even bloodier sword from the Mongolian steppe. So far, so “cool and normal”, but if the native Christians reject Islam and try to recover their homelands- Islamophobia! And if westerners arrived by the sword, or gunboat, then it’s evil imperialism and unfair: “we conquered this first, it’s ours”
I believe that 94% of the population in the Middle East indentify as Muslim, according to Pew Research. I think you will find similar figures in other sources. Perahps is less, let’s say 80%. It’s still a huge majority while all the other religious denominations would compose the remaning 20%. To push the narrative the Middle East is not majority Muslim, as of today, its just not accurate.
It wasn’t my contention that the ME is anything other than predominantly Muslim. My point was that it happened by the sword, by domination with brutal and genocidal handling of native Christians who didn’t submit to Islam and Arab/Turkish invasions. This is venerated as glorious Islamic history. For the first thousand years the sword of Islam cut others. From the 1700s the swords have cut both ways, and from the 1900s they have cut mostly one way, against the now dominant Muslims. It’s only the last chapter that’s being denounced as imperialist, evil and unfair. I hope for peace, I feel bad for the common man caught in this destruction, but let’s not be so naive to think this is a battle of good Vs evil. It’s a struggle for power and domination, and resistance to this by people who have in the past and likely again would dominate others where they could.
Certain Muslims already have with regards to certain non-Muslims (IS versus Yazidis, to give just one example).
While Muslims conquered the lands of the Middle East by force, the description of the treatment of native Christians as “brutal and genocidal” is inaccurate. The change to a Muslim majority in Syria following the Umayyad for instance, appears to have taken 200 years. The inhabitants do not seem to have been converted at the point of a sword.
What is the source of your assertion?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/what-is-the-exact-meaning-of-bulliet%E2%80%99s-conversion-curve.524944/
Um, the Crusaders didn’t invade the Middle East, the Arabs did. The Crusaders were trying to expel them.
Otherwise, I made much the same argument in an essay a week or so ago.
Tje Middle East being what it is, can anyone say with any precision who invaded whom, or for that matter, who today’s “Arabs” really are/were in the olden days?
Call me old-fashioned, but there is a distinction between the Near East and the Middle East (and the Far East) — with the crusaders ever getting involved in a small part of the former — with the population of the Near East being called “Levantines”, not “Arabs”.
My Lebanese acquaintances are pretty emblematic of this (and they are, by definition, Levantines): some are insistent that they are Arabs. Others are insistent that they are not–they are Phoenician. Incidentally, not one of them is an actual Muslim (one is, theoretically, but she is really an atheist.). There is a real uncertainty as to what they really are and that’s bound to be a real barrier to functional tribalism.
The Arabs invaded the Levant during the 7th century. Expanded also to Asia, North-Africa and Europe, particularly the Iberian Peninsula (about 40% of Spanish words are of Arab origin). In the Middle Age they were the cultivated ones and among other things they retained and expanded the classical culture. Later they were the Ottomans the ones to expand. With the Arabs the Islam expanded and later with the Ottomans.
The Crusaders were trying to replace them, they did not come as liberators. Considering that most of the Christendom was actually outside of Europe at the time of the Crusades, but not long after them (until the colonial era began) they basically only managed to weaken the Eastern Christianity.
And it seems Israel and al-Sharaa are now giving a coup de grâce to what survived the Crusades.
Michael Hudson in his talk with Glenn Diesen before the most recent one mentions the Crusaders, argueing that only they were invading – but the rise of Islam did come with an expansionist move too. They did not end up in Hungary eventually Austria by accident (or Lepanto for that matter), nor in Spain. That Jerusalem was a more natural territory to them than European Christianity is obivous. And as you say Christians did come as mostly vicious invaders – which Hudson however makes clear. (For that Ridley Scott made a populist argument with his “Kingdom of Heavens” motion picture where the Arabs are the good guys).
I believe it was this one:
Michael Hudson: The Economics of a Civilizational Conflict
Glenn Diesen
Jul 17, 2025
https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/michael-hudson-the-economics-of-a
p.s. There was also an argument made 15 years ago by German art historian Hans Belting that basis for central perspective in Renaissance originated with Ibn al-Haytham´s scientifc studies which then were introduced at the court of Emperor Frederic II. of Germany in the first half of the 13th century (who most of his time spent in Sicily.)
The Jews did. Read the book of Joshua.
Taking religious texts as faithful historical accounts is more than questionable.
I agree that the Arabs and the Turks (both Seljuk and Ottoman) came to the Levant as invaders and conquerors. I don’t see how that means the Crusaders didn’t, even if at least some Muslims at the time did regard them as preferable to Turks. Arab rule in the region having largely collapsed by then, I’m not sure what you mean by Crusaders trying to expel them; they certainly weren’t trying to remove the Arabs as people. It was just another wave of invasions among many. Officially the point was to defend Christian pilgrims who came increasingly under attack (I don’t know if that’s factually accurate, but it rings true that the dislocations caused by the Turkish takeover would have made travel harder). In practice I think land and other spoils were a common motivation.
One quibble with this text.
I thought, but opinions may differ, that it was the Assad dynasty that tried to create a nation-state. And the end of that dynasty is the end of the nation-state. Just as in Ukraine, what is left is a territory. While Ukraine is the battlefield between Nato and Russia, Syria is now the battlefield between Israel and Türkiye.
And they all involve fighting against Eastern “Schismatics.”. Party like it’s 1054, or 451….
I think Assad tried, and now the new power is trying again with the guidance of Türkiye, which is a nation-state (Iran is another example). My argument is that this may not be the best solution. The way the Kurds are organized in Northern Syria might perhaps offer a better path.
Prior to Bismarck the idea of a German nation-state may have existed with Frederick the Prussian. Medieval predecessor was the Holy Roman Empire, catchy title!
“Modern” Europe was defined at Versailles and later by Churchill and Stalin!
My Irish ancestors some in NY since the famine recalled as much their county as their Irish.
One could consider Iraq and why the border with Iran straddles a huge petroleum sea.
Iraq is another kluge, nearly 2/3 population is Shi’a, while it holds a large part of the Kurd homeland. Why it took Quds and Iraqi allies to finally push ISIS out. The “government: and US not willing to “devote” sufficient resources.
Kiev (US/EU) demanding the larger Donbas is like Berlin demanding tradition Pomerania and East Prussia.
The above sounds like the argument made by the Zionists for why Palestine should be placed under their Europeanized adminstration–not so much a land without people (although they said that too) as a land without a state. They were even going to make the desert bloom and add European pine forests (now withering in the sun).
It has all gone wrong, and while they would blame it on the obstinate barbarian natives, the truth is that they, like the Crusaders, wanted to replace the natives rather than live with them. What mattered was having a “state” with all the civilized financial advantages mentioned above. Deserts blooming and living in touch with the land’s actual resources were secondary.
Perhaps Syria was a similar artificial creation last century but that doesn’t mean its current replacement is any more authentic. These arguments against Assad were held back during Obama time and the counter arguments claimed that Assad really was keeping the very mixed population from killing each other. Even many Iraqis likely believe they were better off under Saddam than what followed.
Meanwhile for Europe it’s all just pieces on a chessboard. The right and the wrong of it hardly matters.
I’m not sure the Crusaders wanted to “replace” the locals, any more than Conquistadors wanted to exterminate the Native Americans. They wanted to transplant feudalism, with themselves at the top and the locals as peasants. The Crusader states in the Middle East were, despite all the massacres that took place along the way, very strange places that were very schizophrenic, jumping between odd tolerance and extreme intolerance–Spain during Reconquista probably illustration (but it was itself a sort of crusader state and rhe source of those conquistadores, on too), but that too ended with forced conversion, expulsion, or worse, I guess…
I don’t believe that the argument I made is similar to the one used by the Zionists. The Zionists want an ethnic nation-state. I argue that there might be other ways of political organization different from the centralized nation-state but equally effective.
The Turkish Sultans also claimed the title of Khalifah, Caliph and thus both spiritual and political leader of Sunni Muslims, not a minor omission in this recap. Also, while Turkey may not have been colonized, the Turks came this close to becoming an uprooted stateless people like the Kurds or Palestinians during their war of independence 1919-1923, the reason why Atatürk is still revered to this day as savior of the nation.
The Turks wer an invasive, medieval, nomadic people.from the Mongolian steppe. They weren’t native to the area, they conquered the lands of the ancient, native inhabitants: Persians, Assyrians, Armenians, Levantine a, and Greeks. And please stop repeating the Turkish propaganda of “war of independence against imperial forces” – the Turks themselves were imperialists who claimed legal succession of the Roman Empire, they lived largely through slaving and seizure. It was a war of imperial succession starting with the Balkan wars by the indigenous populations for their freedom (but yes, the British, French and Italians wanted a slice too).
At the time the Ottomans took over Byzantium, the word “empire” (imperium) had a religious meaning, and a Christian one at that, referring to the role of the state in eschatology. It did not acquire its modern meaning until the Portuguese and British Empires. It would be very, very weird for Turkic Muslims to adopt a foreign Christian term to refer to themselves.
But the Turkish ruler was also the Caesar–Kaysar e Rum, and Mohammed II looked forward to capturing the First Rome, not just the Second, to complete the rebuilding of the Roman Empire. The West aren’t the only heirs of the Roman legacy.
Certainly the West is not the only inheritor — Byzantium is not part of the West, and it was the MAIN inheritor of the Roman theological-political paradigm.
I know very little about the Ottoman Empire, but I am going to suppose that they used the term Caesar to refer to the fact that they now controlled Constantinople?
In any case, the term “empire” at the time did not mean, as it does today, “large multiethnic centralized structure.” It meant, in Christianity, esp. in Orthodox Christianity, “the state the fall of which is followed by the end of the world.”
Not just Constantinople. There were “good” medium to long term reasons why the Ottomans fought at Lepanto and Malta, among other places in central Mediterranean. Italy was the heart of Rum. The Ottoman ruler is the Kaysar. Rum belongs to the Kaysar. Simple, really. (Sure, but was the Turkish claim any less valid than that of the Germanic Kaiser? After all, neither belonged to the same tribe, culture, or religion as Augustus.)
‘However, what is terrorism and who is a terrorist? Who gets to label others as terrorists? Who is a jihadist and why?’
Pretty sure that 9/11 counts as terrorism which was carried out by Al Qaeda. And Jolani’s mob counts as an affiliate of Al Qaeda by their own reckoning. That $10 million reward on his head may have been a bit of a clue too. Thing is that it does not matter which region you are talking about, you have to have some sort of administration in place to run basic infrastructure like water, energy, sewerage, etc. And that administration has to also supply medical care, food distribution, internal security with police and external security with a military. The nation state seems to be the best working model and for the Middle East and we can’t go back to the Ottoman Empire which ran that whole region as that model no longer works. Syria may have been a viable State but it was deliberately destroyed. By my count over 100,000 terrorist Jihadists were sent in trained, equipped and financed by the west in a brutal war, the US occupied their oil regions to not only steal their oil but to deny Syria the capability of using money from that to pay the expenses of running the country, their crop growing regions were also occupied by the US leading to malnutrition among the population and a brutal embargo was done through the Caesar sanctions to ensure that they could never rebuild their country. So you cannot say that Syria as a country could not work as a country when it was deliberately destroyed by the Collective West. As a country Syria did not fail – it was destroyed by external forces and now the Collective West is happy to see Al Qaeda running the place. 9/11? What’s that?
Thanks, Rev Kev. While the discussion of the devlet in the main post is interesting, and the word devlet is still in use in Turkish, I find the idea that the Ottoman state was loosey-goosey and oh-so-religiously tolerant a tad inaccurate. I note the comments above about the Turkish sultan being Caliph and Caesar.
First, the court language of the Ottomans was Persian, so they would have been fully aware of Persia as an empire. The court also would have been preoccupied with keeping the Persians at bay in the Caucasus and in Mesopotamia.
There were plenty of forced conversions. One has only to look up the devşirme.
Second:
As to Syria, I agree strongly with the second half of your comment. Syria could have been run more or less like Lebanon, once called the Switzerland of the Middle East (those were the days). It would have taken the same balancing act. Likewise, the Lebanese identity is somewhat fragile, as is the Syrian. But Syria was one of the first French mandates to escape, and France and the US of A have been horsing around in Syria ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1949_Syrian_coup_d%27état#
Syria was wrecked by Big Power politicking, much as Iraq has been.
The Levantine states, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria could have been much alike, mixed populations under fairly weak governments. But the region is much too tempting to the English, Americans, French, and Israelis as a place to exploit.
The weird thing is that many Turko-Mongolic peoples of Central Asia looked towards Persia–a variant of Persian was the court language of Tamerlane and his capital, Samarkand, was supposed to have been a Persian speaking city well into 20th century. Persian terms show up a lot in social and cultural history of Xinjiang well into late 19th century, when the Chinese subdued a major rebellion and strengthened its rule over the province. “Culture” in Central Asia and Middle East was very kooky.
So 100,000 jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda were sent—individuals who had been trained and financed by the US, the same country that labels Al-Qaeda as terrorists. I’m sorry, but something doesn’t add up; at the very least, the label is questionable.
I agree that any region must have some form of administration. The Kurds in Rojava have one. It has issues, but it isn’t a centralized nation-state. There are other models, though we’ve been conditioned to think otherwise.
I don’t believe the nation-state is the best model for the Middle East, and the last 100 years of constant turmoil might support that claim.
We tend to underestimate and patronize the people of the Middle East by constantly attributing their failures and successes to external causes.
@Curro Jimenez
As to your first sentence, that is exactly what happened. The US set up training bases in places like Jordan to train them up and equip them before sending them to Syria. The New York Times interviewed at least one of the trainers there who said that he hated doing the job as he knew that later on US troops would have to fight these guys. Here is a link to the CIA program that did this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
Deeper and longer. I suspect Arabian Peninsula Sunni-Wahabbis, etc helped recruit and finance “ISIS”. US provided a lot of SoF insight and not bombing them as IDF should have.
What’s an empire to do?
Nina Paley said it best in This Land is Mine”.
“Why does this matter? Devlet comes from the Arabic dawlat, meaning something that changes, rotates, or alternates. It can also be understood as “polity.” Translating it as “state”, with the Western connotation of the term, would be incorrect, because a state implies something fixed, while the term implies something in flux. According to Maksudoğlu, the Osmanlis did not view themselves as either a state or an empire—at least not until the Tanzimat reforms, aimed at centralization, in the mid-nineteenth century. The term also connotes circulation and exchange, which, when applied to governance, carries an economic dimension.”
That’s very interesting but I’m not sure what to make of it. From looking it up, it seems like the emphasis of this concept may be on the (inevitably transient, but hopefully indefinitely prolonged) rule of a dynasty, if the “time of their fortune” translation I found is to be trusted. If so that all seems very apropos for the Assads. Whether they wanted something more or not, they still ended up replicating the pattern of short-lived dynastic rule, like so many other regional dynasties before the Ottomans.
I was just able to read this essay this morning. I have to say I was somewhat taken aback by its one-sidedness, as several commentators have noted. But more distressing is the fact that the side taken here is very congruent with the Western narrative, though Curro is trying to make the opposite case. It is not that the facts presented are not correct. But they are presented in a selective and idealized way that neglects crucial elements of the historical and geopolitical context in which Syria was dismantled. Though Curro admits to an “idealized” version of history, the portrait of politics under the Ottomans could have been written by AK Party ideologists. The Shia-Sunni comparisons are similarly one-sided. The image of Syria under the “Assad dynasty” presented here – as a brutal dictatorship held together only by force and terror – is misleading and decontextualized, but most importantly it is completely compatible with Western propaganda. And though the nation-states of the region were indeed imposed from the outside, it is crucial to analyze why the Arab nationalism or Baathist socialism of these secular “Western” style states were targets for destabilization and ultimately destruction – by the West.
Please note that I am not accusing Curro of being an apologist for Western interests. He is obviously critical of what the West has done to the Middle East. But this is a one-sided history that reflects the author’s own ideals. Invoking the Kurds as an example hints at what those ideals might be. Unfortunately, this depiction of the failure of the “Western nation-state” model in the region fits nicely with the neocon vision of a fragmented and Balkanized region of competing ethno-religious factions.