A wonderful little essay! :) ‘Do Iraq and Syria no longer really exist?’ exclaimed a recent post on the Foreign Policy blog in tones of breathless alarm. The advance of Islamic State across the two countries has been relentless, matched only by the speed with which Foreign Policy’s answer to this question is itself swallowed up on its website by those ubiquitously insurgent pop-up ads for discounted subscriptions to FP Magazine. With the bloody impasse of the Syrian conflict, the evident weakness of the Iraqi armed forces in the face of the ISIS threat, and pinpointed US airstrikes that persistently prick holes in Levantine sovereignties, the international commentariat has begun to wonder whether Islamic State’s goal of smashing the Sykes-Picot borders of the Middle East might actually be the best solution for the future of the region. ‘The end of Sykes-Picot?’ asks Itamar Rabinovitch in a paper for the Brookings Institution: ‘The unravelling of the current political order in the core of the Middle East may reshape the strategic landscape.’ ‘Is it the end of Sykes-Picot?’ inquires Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books. ‘Sykes-Picot is dead!’ exclaims Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, somewhat dramatically, to the Independent’s veteran journalist Robert Fisk. The newfound fluidity of the region’s established borders has become an idée fixe of the current debate, much to the chagrin of indignant historians, who point out that the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1915 was never actually implemented in the first place. The borders that exist today in the Levant were, they point out, laid down at the San Remo conference of 1920 and, in any case, were neither entirely artificial nor wholly external impositions (as scholar Reidar Visser explains in his article ‘Dammit! It is not unravelling!’). Such insignificant concerns as accuracy, of course, have never clouded the commentariat’s visions of the Middle East. The symbolic import of the phrase ‘Sykes-Picot’ suggests that this trope has become a permanent fixture in how we imagine the region’s political landscape. [...] Why is it that Western journalists and policymakers recurrently express such fascination with the notion of remapping the Middle East? As we have seen, even those who draw these maps admit they chart fantastical creations, stitched together from the disassembled body parts of real countries. Mythical entities such as Greater Jordan, Arabia Felix and the Tetrapolis act as stimulants to the political imagination: much like those incredible chimerae that illustrate the pages of medieval bestiaries, they are intended to provoke wonder and amazement, not to provide a field guide for encounters in the wild. Given their singularly potent power to induce geopolitical fantasy, maps have long been the preferred opiate of occidental elites... [...] The hallucinatory effect of overlong meditation upon maps may in part have been popularized by colonial adventures in the Middle East, but the practice soon became widespread throughout the world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most notably, nationalist movements that demanded autonomy, self-rule, and independence couched their political vision in terms of their right to claim a sovereign space for their people alongside the sovereign spaces of other peoples. In later years, the vision of one people in one space successfully mobilized legitimate struggles against occupation and colonialism. But it also enabled darker imaginings of national purity, sometimes with murderous consequences, as the nation sought to ‘cleanse’ its territory of impure and alien elements. At its most extreme, the drive for the homogenization of a population within the space of a given state gave rise to genocidal impulses that reached their peak with both organized and spontaneous massacres and expulsions of ethnic and cultural minorities: the Holocaust of the Jews, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, the Akazu slaughter of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, among many other instances. For good and for ill, the power of the map has induced across the world a collective dreamtime in which our political consciousness almost entirely exists within a realm defined by the cartography of nation-states. Deeply embedded in the this cartographic imagination is the notion that it should be natural that social divisions—whether along tribal, ethnic, religious or cultural lines—should correspond to spatial divisions that can be drawn straightforwardly on a map. From this perspective, Alawis, Sunnis, Shia, and Jews – and every other sect, ethnicity, or communal group, in theory – are all entitled to their own political sovereignties. This is the principle of one group, one state, in which identity and geography are – or, more dangerously, should be – essentially indistinguishable. In this light, journalists who describe a remapped Middle East should not be understood as engineers carefully constructing prototypes for real political projects, but as daydreamers participating in a collective, map-induced trance. In this altered state of consciousness, redrawing the Middle East map is not the product of any individual political inspiration: those who draw these fantastical shapes are merely empty vessels, possessed by the power of the map, through which the cartographic imagination seeps into the corporeal world. To propose that ‘natural states’ should replace the ‘artificial states’ created by the ‘Sykes-Picot’ settlement in the Middle East is (as hinted at by all six scare quotes) misconceived from the very beginning. Remapping the Middle East is no more than a fantasy concocted from a phantasm, an illusion distilled from the fragments of a half-remembered dream. The meaning of these fictive maps is, much like the meaning of a dream, hopelessly over-determined: they symbolize imperial self-delusion, social engineering, the will-to-power, political techno-fetishism, Utopian yearning, messianic promise – all this, and much more. The potency of the map is such that it stimulates the full scale, sensory range, and ambition of our political imagination. Yet, despite the promise of cartographic solutions to the political problems of the world, they simply prolong the life of the troublesome equation of identity and geography. It is this dangerous equivalence that needs to be unraveled, not the borders of Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot. In order to overcome the problems of political geography, we must resist the pernicious temptations of the map-pushers and find a way to kick the habit of our cartographic imagination.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:59:26 +0000
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